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" Stay yet, look back with me unto the Tower. 
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes 
Whom envy hath immured within your walls, 
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones !" 

Shakes/>ea7-e's " Richard III. 



Chapter 6. 



THE BOOKLOVER'S 
LONDON 

BY 

A. ST JOHN ADGOGK 



WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS BY 

FREDERICK ADGOCK 



NEW YORK 

THE MAGMILLAN COMPANY 

1913 



& 



l« 



A 



PREFACE 

GOING up Cornhill a year or two ago, on a 
day when snow was falling, I happened to 
remember that somewhere about there was the 
court in which Scrooge, of Dickens's Christmas Carol, 
had his home and business premises, and that coming 
from his bleak tank of an office one cutting, wintry 
night Scrooge's clerk, Bob Cratchit, was so carried 
away by the joyous spirit of the season that he " went 
down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, 
twenty times in honour of its being Christmas Eve ; " 
and somehow Bob Cratchit became as real to me 
in that moment as were any of the obvious people 
swarming on the pavement around me. As a matter 
of fact, he and his like are much more real than most 
of us ; for in a few years we shall have passed away 
like shadows, and our places will have forgotten us, 
but he will still be going down that slide on Cornhill, 
as he has been going down it already for exactly 
seventy years. If any so-called real person, walking 
audibly in undeniable boots, dared to indulge in a 



sk 



vi THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

similar pastime upon Cornhill nowadays, he would 
be promptly stopped by a policeman, and probably 
locked up ; but Bob Cratchit is so potent a reality 
that no transitory policeman born of woman has 
power to check his happy outlawry and take him off 
that slide. 

Surely here be truths sufficient to justify the 
making of this volume. Why should we differentiate 
between people who were once clay and are now 
dreams, and people who have never had to pass 
through that gross period of probation but have 
been dreams from the beginning ? Many books have 
been written about London's associations with men 
and women of the more solid kind, who had to pay 
rent for their houses ; I have written two myself ; 
there have been books about Dickens's London and 
Thackeray's London, but T do not think there has 
been any book on a large scale devoted to London's 
associations with the imaginary folk of the novelists 
and dramatists — with those familiar citizens who 
are literally free of the city and live where they will 
in it unfretted by landlords or tax-collectors, and 
who having once walked into one or another of its 
streets through certain books are walking in it 
always for whoever actually knows London. For 
you know very little of London if you do not know 
more than you can see of it. So T hope to be forgiven 
for making this humble and perhaps inadequate 



PREFACE vii 

contribution to a branch of history that has been 
rather neglected. 

I have not attempted anything in the way of 
research. As a fairly miscellaneous reader, my plan 
has been simply to select a route and to go along it 
gossiping of what memories I have of the imaginary 
men and women connected with the places we pass 
by the way. It was wrong of me to allow divers 
sometime real people haunting the same ground to 
intrude upon our visionary company, but I have 
done so partly for the sake of contrast, and partly 
because I am equally interested in them and could 
not resist the temptation to let them come in. If I 
have gone on any principle at all it has been one of 
including what appeals to me and leaving out what 
does not. The banks that stand in Lombard Street 
are so many dead and unattractive piles of stone so 
far as I am concerned, but if I knew which particular 
one Thackeray had in mind when he sent Becky 
Sharp in a coach to Lombard Street to cash the cheque 
Lord Steyne had given her I should take an interest 
in that bank. Even before I was aware that Shake- 
speare lodged for several years in a house that has 
been replaced by a tavern at the corner of Silver 
Street and Monkwell Street, I had a sort of sentimental 
regard for that spot, because Ben Jonson in his 
Staple of News puts Pennyboy, Senr., to live " in 
Silver Street, the region of money, a good seat for 



viii THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

an usurer/' I am not indifferent to the fact that 
Samuel Titmarsh was a clerk in an Insurance office 
in Cornhill ; that Mr Carker, showing all his teeth, 
used to ride up Cheapside ona" gleaming bay " on 
his road home of evenings from Mr. Dombey's ware- 
house, which lay in a byway towards Leadenhall 
Street ; that Dobbin and Joe Sedley stayed at 
Slaughter's Coffee House in St. Martin's Lane ; that 
Ferdinand Armine, of Henrietta Temple, and old 
Sedley, with little George Osborn, of Vanity Fair, 
were fond of roaming in Kensington Gardens ; that 
Clem Peckover and Bob Hewett, of Gissing's Nether 
World, loitered on the Embankment and leaned over 
the parapet between Waterloo Bridge and Temple 
Pier looking at the river, whilst Clem was subtly 
tempting Hewett to murder her husband, so that 
the two might go off together with his money — I 
am not indifferent to those and scores of other such 
memories though I have said nothing about them in 
these pages. I could take you to Tower Hill and 
show you where Vincent Scattergood, of Albert 
Smith's Scattergood Family, gazed about him and 
ruminated, leaning up against the railings of Trinity 
Square ; and the last time T crossed Waterloo Bridge 
and noticed the shot tower, I remembered that, in 
the same story, Fogg, the dramatist, who lived in a 
blind court off Drury Lane, used to cross it too, 
on his way to the Surrey Theatre, in Blackfriars 



PREFACE ix 

Road, and invariably " became preoccupied with en- 
deavouring to render the shot tower available " in 
his next melodrama. But I wondered whether many 
were now intimate enough with Albert Smith and 
his world to take pleasure in such records. It is a 
long time since I read him myself, and I confess I 
shall never read him again ; therefore you will find I 
have said little about him. I have omitted other 
associations for the same reason. Indeed, it is 
probable that I have omitted a great deal ; some 
things knowingly, for lack of space ; some because I 
forgot them until too late ; and some, of course, from 
sheer ignorance. But for all my sins of omission I offer 
no excuse, except a frank acknowledgment that, even 
though I may know as much as anyone else, I do not 
know all about anything, certainly not about London, 
and let only him who does cast the first stone ! 

A. ST. J. A. 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. 

I. Personal and General 



II. " The Saracen's Head " and Newgate 

III. The Poetry of Cheapside 

IV. Up and Down the City Road 



V. Mr. Pickwick, Lizzie Hexam, and some Others 98 



VI. To the Tower 

VII. By the Thames, and up the Monument 
VIII. South of the Thames .... 
IX. In the Shadow of St. Paul's 
X. Fleet Street and the Temple 
XI. The Strand and Westminster 
XII. Piccadilly and the Parks . 
XIII. Oxford Street, Holborn and Clerkenwell 
Index ...... 



PAGE 

I 

37 
75 



"5 
160 

175 
203 
219 

245 
269 
282 
3*3 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



The Tower of London Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Entrance to Bartholomew Close, West Smith- 
field . . 16.x 

Stepney Green 32 - 

London Stone, Cannon Street . . . . 48 "" 

Paradise Street, Lambeth 64 ' 

Walnut Tree Walk, Lambeth . . . . 80-"* 

High Street, Lambeth 96 -" 

St. Nicholas Church, Deptford .... 112-"" 

Bankside . . . . . . . . 128 " 

Holland Street, Blackfriars .... 144 s 

Clifford's Inn 160 y 

Lincoln's Inn Gateway, Chancery Lane . . 176 - 

Lamb Building, Middle Temple .... 192^* 

Fountain Court, Temple 208 -' 

Walpole House, Chiswick Mall .... 224' 

The Spaniards, Hampstead 240" 

The Garden, Staple Inn 256'' 

53 Hatton Garden . . . . . .272 

Clerkenwell Close ...... 288^ 

Wash-house Court, Charterhouse .... 304 

xiii 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



CHAPTER I 

PERSONAL AND GENERAL 

EVERY man finds his own charm in London, 
and unfortunately it too often blinds him to all 
the charms that other men have found in it. "I see 
that the Londoner is also, like me, a stranger in 
London," wrote Emerson in one of his Journals ; 
1 1 have a good deal to tell him of it." It is curious, 
how complacently the visitor or new resident assumes 
that the mystery, the wonder, the beauty, the fasci- 
nation of London that is new to him has never been 
discovered before, and that certainly the poor Cockney 
takes no interest in his native city and knows nothing 
about it. In the same spirit of surprise at his own 
discovery a writer (evidently one of these excited 
new-comers) noted in my newspaper the other morn- 
ing that " the average Londoner will not take the 
trouble to find out that on a very clear day if he 
looks straight down Bouverie Street he will have a 
view of the Crystal Palace over in Surrey." Well, 
I am a Cockney and an average Londoner, but I 
shall never go out of my way to obtain that dis- 
tracting vision, not because I am indifferent to the 
charm of London but simply because I do not want 
to see the Crystal Palace, and do not count any 

T 1 



2 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

prospect of it among the thousand and one reasons 
why I love my birthplace and keep an unfailing 

interest in it. 

You may be irresistibly attracted to London by 
its glamorous literary or historical associations ; by 
the fulness, variety, and eagerness of its life ; by the 
homely sense of human neighbourhood that enfolds 
you in its crowded thoroughfares ; by the bizarre 
splendour and pulsing movement of it when all the 
lamps are alight and the shop-windows flood the 
tumultuous streets with golden fire ; by the mystery 
and stranger beauty of it when it lies lifeless under 
the quiet stars and so lonely that you can hear the 
echo of your footsteps as you go ; by the countless 
real and imaginary romances of men and women 
who have died and men and women who have never 
lived that fill its highways and byways, day and 
night, with dreams and ghosts ;— there is such a magic 
in the very names of many of its streets that, if you 
know it, when you read them and say them to your- 
self the long rows of big modern buildings grow as 
unsubstantial as a mist and fade away and rows 
of smaller, quainter, more picturesque houses rise 
in their stead and all old London as it used to be 
but will never be again closes in about you as by 
enchantment. , 

Perhaps this large and general apprehension ot 
the city's witchery is coloured and intensified by 
feelings and intimate memories peculiar to yourself, 
and once you are fully susceptible to its manifold, 
indescribable charm, that view of the Crystal Palace 
on a clear day really does not seem a joy worth 
troubling about. It may be well enough for the 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 3 

casual explorer to make acquaintance with all those 
"places of interest" listed in the guide-book and 
then go away and boast that he has seen more of 
London and has more regard for it than the average 
Londoner who confesses he has never been up the 
Monument; but the Cockney, as a rule, looks 
upon those places of interest as convenient objects 
intended mainly for the amusement of visitors— the 
things that he loves London for are not such common 
public property. When he is exiled and home-sick, 
far off in Canada or Australia, it is not the Duke of 
York's column, or even Nelson's, that lifts a beckon- 
ing finger in his dreams to lure him back ; it is no 
mental picture of the British Museum or the National 
Gallery that brings the longing to his heart or the 
tears to his eyes,— I know what London means to 
him because I know what it means to me, who was 
born in it and have grown to manhood in it, so that 
now I can scarcely walk down any of its streets but 
my boyhood or my younger manhood has been there 
before me ; something of my past has been trodden 
into its stones and is as inseparable from it, though 
none knows anything of this but myself, as all its 
older, greater memories. 

So it comes to pass that the charm of London is 
largely incommunicable. I cannot realise all that 
it is to you, nor you all that it is to me, because our 
experiences, our personal associations with it are 
not identical. If I were to tell you why a certain 
doorway in Southampton Street, out of Holborn, 
is the saddest place in all London to me, and why 
it is I can never think of St. Swithin's Lane without 
ieeing it paved with sunshine, you would under- 



4 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

stand my feelings but could not share them ; you 
could still pass both places without being touched 
by that secret spell they can always cast upon me. 
Therefore, I am not attempting anything so hope- 
less as to distil into these pages the whole ineffable 
charm of London, but shall be satisfied if I can ex- 
tract from that some one of its many enchantments 
to which we are all amenable, blending with it, for 
purposes of comparison and sharper emphasis, just 
so little of its more exclusively personal elements as 
one man may easily communicate to another. 

It does not matter where we make a beginning ; 
you cannot go down any street of the city without 
walking into the past ; but I have a private fancy 
to start from Smithfield Market, partly because I 
am drawn to it by curious personal ties, chiefly 
because it looks the least but is really one of the 
most romantic parts of London. Take the train to 
Farringdon Street, and as you come out of the station 
you will see inscribed on the wall facing you " Cow 
Cross Street, Leading to Turnmill Street," and the 
sight of that name may remind you that this is the 
street that was in old days known colloquially as 
Turnbull Street : it was a shockingly disreputable 
place of brothels and gambling dens, as you have 
gathered from frequent references to it in the plays 
of the Elizabethan dramatists. " Lord, Lord ! " 
says Falstaff, talking of Justice Shallow, in Henry 
the Fourth, " how subject we old men are to this 
vice of lying. This same starved Justice hath done 
nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his 
youth and the feats he hath done about Turnbull 
Street ; and every third word a lie." Ursula, in Ben 



i 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 5 

Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, cries out against Knockem, 
the horse-courser, " You are one of those horse- 
leaches that gave out I was dead in Turnbull Street 
of a surfeit of bottle-ale and tripes ? " One of the 
characters in Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheap- 
side exclaims, on stealing a basket of provisions and 
finding nothing but veal in it, 

I promised faithfully 
To send this morning a fat quarter of lamb 
To a kind gentlewoman in Turnbull Street. 

Justice Nimis, counting up his estate in Randolph's 
The Muses' Looking-Glass, says, 

The yearly value 
Of my fair manor of Clerkenwell is pounds 
So many, besides new-year's capons, the lordship 
Of Turnbull, so — which, with my Pict-hatch grange 
And Shoreditch farm, and other premises 
Adjoining — very good, a pretty maintenance 
To keep the Justice of Peace, and coram too. 

Pict-hatch was an infamous establishment in Turn- 
bull Street, and you have Falstaff again, in The 
Merry Wives of Windsor, rating Pistol, with " Go : 
a short knife and a throng ! — to your manor of Pict- 
hatch ! go " ; and Randolph starts the young gallant, 
Neanias, singing, in Hey for Honesty, Down with 
Knavery, 

Come, beldame, follow me, 
And in my footsteps tread, 
Then set up shop in Turnbull Street . . . 

Well, if you walk a few yards to the left as you 
come out of the railway station, here you are in that 



6 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

same Turnmill, otherwise Turnbull Street ; but there 
is no sign of a brook here now, nor any of the mills 
that Stow says used to stand hereabouts, nor any 
of those rascally haunts with which the playwrights 
of Shakespeare's time were so familiar. One side 
of the street is occupied by a blank wall that shuts 
off the underground railway, and the other by tower- 
ing warehouses and severely decorous business pre- 
mises. There is a narrow byway out of it, with 
a brood of furtive, squalid alleys and quaint frowsy 
courts, in which Falstaff might still feel compara- 
tively at home, but we are for Smithfield, and will turn 
back and along Cow Cross Street to get there. But 
I cannot pass by Peter Lane, which was formerly 
Peter Street, in Cow Cross Street, without remember- 
ing that unhappy urchin, young St. Giles, in Douglas 
Jerrold's almost forgotten novel of St. Giles and St. 
James : he had been led by the cunning Tom Blast 
into stealing a horse, which he rode into Smithfield. 

" He then walked the pony slowly up Long Lane, and soon 
as he espied the Blue Posts, faithful to his orders, he dismounted, 
looking anxiously about him for his friend and instructor, 
Tom Blast. A quarter of an hour passed, and still he came 
not. And then, and for the first time, he looked at the stolen 
goods with lowering eyes, and his heart felt leaden. . . . Any- 
thing to be well clear of the pony. With this thought St. Giles 
had his foot in the stirrup, when he was tapped upon the 
shoulder by a man plainly and comfortably dressed in a dark- 
grey suit, wearing a light flaxen wig in tight curls, surmounted 
by a large beaver hat, scrupulously sleek. He had a broad 
fat face, with a continual smile laid like lacquer upon it. And 
when he spoke, he spoke very gently and very softly, as with 
lips of butter. 

" ' My dear little boy,' said the stranger, patting St. Giles 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 7 

affectionately on the back, ' where have you been so 
long ? ' 

" St. Giles looked — he could not help it — very suspiciously 
at the stranger ; then scratching his head, he observed, ' Don't 
know you, sir.' 

" ' I dare say not ; how should you, my dear ? But you 
will know me, and for a friend. I've waited for you these ten 



This kindly stranger gently twitched the bridle from 
his hand, and St. Giles felt that the stolen pony was 
being stolen from him ; but his suspicions were quieted ; 
he was rewarded with a guinea, and roamed about 
London and lived on this for over a week. 

" It was on the ninth day of St. Giles's absence from his 
maternal home, and the pilgrim of London stood before a 
house of humble entertainment in Cow Cross. The time was 
noon ; and St. Giles, feeling the last threepence in his pocket — 
turning them over one by one — was endeavouring to arbitrate 
between pudding and a bed. If he bought a cut of pudding — 
and through the very window-pane he seemed to nose its 
odour — he had not wherewithal to buy a lodging. What of 
that ? London had many doorways — hospitable stone-steps — 
for nothing ; and pudding must be paid for. Still he hesitated ; 
when the cook-shop man removed the pudding from the window. 
This removal decided St. Giles. He rushed into the shop, 
and laid down his last worldly stake upon the counter. ' Three- 
pennorth o' puddin', and a good threepennorth,' said St. Giles. 
With a look of half-reproof and half-contempt the tradesman 
silently executed the order ; and in a few moments St. Giles 
stood upon the King's highway, devouring with great relish 
his last threepence. Whilst thus genially employed, he heard 
a far-off voice roar through the muggy air : his heart beat, 
and he ate almost to choking as he listened to these familiar 
words :— c A Most True and Particular Account of the Horrible 
Circumstance of a Bear that has been Fed upon Five Young 



8 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Children in a Cellar in Westminster ! ' It was the voice of 
Blast ; and St. Giles swallowed his pudding, hurriedly used 
the back of his hand for a napkin, and following the sound of 
the crier, was in a trice in Peter Street, and one of the mob 
that circled the marvel-monger of Hog Lane." 

Half of Cow Cross Street still remains very much 
what it was when St. Giles knew it ; there is still an 
old cook-shop there that might well be the very one 
he patronised, and two doors beyond it is Peter 
Street. We emerge from Cow Cross Street, and 
across the road, all along the other side of Charter- 
house Street, stretches the heavy, red length of 
Smithfield Market ; the yawning central arcade takes 
you at a gulp, and mid-way through we glance in 
at the great gateways to right and left of us and see 
white-robed butchers moving about in cool, far- 
reaching groves of gross mutton and beef ; trucks 
loaded with meat pass and repass us ; and outside, 
all round the building, butchers' carts and vans 
cluster closely, like flies on a bone. Coming out at 
the other end of the arcade, before us is the broad 
open space of West Smithfield, and immediately on 
our left is that Long Lane into which St. Giles rode 
on his stolen horse. In the centre of the open space 
a road winds down to a Goods Station of the Midland 
Railway that is out of sight under the ground upon 
which the martyrs used to be burned at the stake ; 
beyond, the dull stone buildings of St. Bartholo- 
mew's Hospital gloom all along the opposite side of 
the square and extend into Giltspur Street, and if 
you say that name to yourself properly the sordid, 
red Market loses its solidity and rolls away like a 
cloud ; the huge Hospital dwindles to less than a 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 9 

quarter its present size ; the fountain and railed-in 
garden go from the middle of the square, and the 
subterranean Goods Station with them ; the big 
new banks and taverns and warehouses shrink and 
vanish and their places are filled by a picturesque 
huddle of quaint old red-tiled houses and inns from 
the windows of which crowds of laughing ladies and 
gallant gentlemen look out upon a broad green field 
from which noisy swarms of the common city folk 
are shut off by stout wooden barriers ; and pre- 
sently up this same Giltspur Street a company of 
knights, flashing the sun back from their armour, ride 
in to a tournament. The one familiar object of modern 
London that rose before them familiarly as they rode 
in is the glorious old church of St. Bartholomew, that 
stands at the eastern corner of Smithfield. 

But you may read all about this in Stow's Survey 
of London. The church has undergone numerous 
restorations but much of it remains as when it was 
first built in 1102 by Rahere, King Henry the First's 
jester, who turned monk and became its first Prior. 
Stow tells you, too, of the tournaments, " For example 
to note : — In the year 1357, the 31st. of Edward III., 
great and royal jousts were there holden in Smith- 
field ; there being present the Kings of England, 
France and Scotland, with many other nobles and 
great estates of divers lands," and after several such 
records he comes to, " In the 14th. of Richard II., 
after Froisart, royal jousts and tournaments were 
proclaimed to be done in Smithfield, to begin on 
Sunday next after the feast of St. Michael. ... At 
the day appointed there issued forth of the Tower, 
about the third hour of the day, sixty coursers, 



10 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

apparelled for the jousts, and upon every one an 
esquire of honour, riding a soft pace ; then came 
forth sixty ladies of honour, mounted upon palfreys, 
riding on the one side, richly apparelled, and every 
lady led a knight with a chain of gold, those knights 
being on the king's party had their harness and 
apparel garnished with white harts, and crowns of 
gold about the harts' necks, and so they came riding 
through the streets of London to Smithfield, with 
a great number of trumpets and other instruments 
of music before them. The king and queen, who 
were lodged in the bishop's palace of London, were 
come from thence, with many great estates, and 
placed in chambers to see the jousts ; the ladies 
that led the knights were taken down from their 
palfreys, and went up to chambers prepared for them. 
Then alighted the esquires of honour from their 
coursers, and the knights in good order mounted 
upon them ; and after their helmets were set on 
their heads, and being ready in all points, proclama- 
tion made by the heralds, the jousts began, and 
many commendable courses were run, to the great 
pleasure of the beholders. These jousts continued 
many days, with great feasting, as ye may read in 
Froisart." And Will Catur, the armourer, was not 
the only man accused of treason who brought his 
innocence to the trial by combat and fought 
his accuser and slew him or was slain by him in 
Smithfield. 

Already, in those years, a horse and cattle market 
was held in Smithfield every Friday, and already 
the annual Fair of Bartholomew had beeen started : 
part of it, devoted entirely to the sale of goods, was 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 11 

held in the churchyard and in the Close surrounding 
the church, and part of it, given over to amusements, 
shows, feastings and general frivolity was scattered 
all about the open plain of Smithfield itself. The 
Fairs outlasted the Tournaments, and when the 
tournament had become a barbarous thing of the 
past, the London mob made holiday in Smithfield 
to see the stake driven into the earth here, the 
faggots piled, smoke rise and many a stubborn 
martyr burnt alive in the great name of Christianity. 
Scores of such victims to the childish dogmas of 
conceited theologians went up to heaven in their 
chariots of fire from this same ground, but more 
readily than any other I recall the martyrdom of 
Anne Askew, less on account of poor Anne herself, 
perhaps, than because of a certain detailed and 
amazingly vivid picture that is part of Foxe's nar- 
rative of her sufferings. Her chief offence was that 
she differed with the Bishop of London and his 
priests concerning the doctrine of transubstantia- 
tion ; she refused to agree that the sacramental 
bread was the veritable body of Christ. " As for 
what ye call your god," she said boldly, according 
to Foxe, "it is a piece of bread ; for a more proof 
thereof, mark it when you list, let it but lie in the 
box three months and it will be mouldy and so turn 
to nothing that is good. Whereupon I am per- 
suaded that it cannot be God." They imprisoned 
her in the Tower and piously endeavoured to change 
her mind by stretching her limbs on the rack, till 
she was so maimed and warped that she could not 
use her feet ; then, as she still failed to see eye to 
eye with them, they decided that there was only 



12 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

one way left in which they could get the best of the 
argument, so, as Foxe has it : 

" The day of her execution being appointed, she was brought 
into Smithfield in a chair, because she could not go on her 
feet, by means of her great torments. When she was brought 
to the stake, she was tied by the middle with a chain that 
held up her body. When all things were thus prepared to 
the fire, Dr. Shaxton, who was then appointed to preach, 
began his sermon. Anne Askew, hearing and answering again 
unto him, where he said well, confirmed the same ; where he 
said amiss, there, said she, he misseth and speaketh without 
the book. 

" The sermon being finished, the other martyrs (John Lacels, 
John Adams, and Nicholas Belenian), standing there tied to 
three several stakes, ready to their martyrdom, began their 
prayers. The multitude and concourse of the people were 
exceeding, the place where they stood being railed about to 
keep out the press. Upon the bench, under St. Bartholomew's 
church, sat Wrisley, chancellor of England, the old Duke of 
Norfolk, the Lord Mayor, with divers other more. Before 
the fire should be set unto them, one of the bench hearing 
that they had gunpowder about them and being afraid the 
faggots by the strength of the gunpowder would come flying 
about their ears, began to be afraid : but the Earl of Bedford, 
declaring unto him the gunpowder was not laid under the 
faggots, but only about their bodies to rid them out of their 
pain, which having vent, there was no danger to them of the 
faggots, so diminished their fear. 

" Then Wrisley, Lord Chancellor, sent to Anne Askew 
letters, offering to her the King's pardon if she would recant. 
Who refusing once to look upon them, made this answer again : 
That she came not thither to deny her Lord and Master. Then 
were the letters likewise offered unto the other, who in like 
manner, following the constancy of the woman, denied not only 
to receive them, but also to look on them. Whereupon the 
Lord Mayor commanding fire to be put to them, cried with 
a loud voice, Fiat justitia. 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 13 

" And thus the good Anne Askew, with these blessed martyrs, 
being troubled so many manner of ways, and having passed 
through so many torments, having now ended the long course 
of her agonies, being compassed in with flames of fire, as a 
blessed sacrifice unto God, she slept in the Lord, anno 1546, 
leaving behind her a singular example for all men to follow." 

These things do not pass away ; and I can never 
cross Smithfield nowadays without hearing that 
loud cry of the Lord Mayor's thrilling above the 
dense mob again, without seeing the flames rise 
about the chained figures of the four martyrs, with- 
out seeing on the bench in front of this same old St. 
Bartholomew's church that little group of elderly, 
gorgeously attired dignitaries, discussing the prob- 
able action of the gunpowder mercifully fastened 
round the waists of the sufferers and fussily agitated 
by fears for their own safety. So long as Smithfield 
remains they keep their place in it for those who 
know where to look for them and how to see them. 

But Smithfield is haunted by other and happier 
memories. For certain August days of every year, 
during several centuries and down to less than a 
century ago, it was all aroar with the business and 
revelry of Bartholomew Fair. Sometimes the Fair 
would begin only a day after one of the martyrdoms, 
and the roistering London crowd would swarm in 
to make merry and riot among the stalls and booths 
over earth that was still blackened from yesterday's 
fires. Look round and you shall note ancient land- 
marks of those days in the old church, the hospital, 
and in the names of the streets : in Long Lane, 
Cloth Fair, Bartholomew Close, Little Britain (though 
this end of it was Duck Lane in the Fair time), Gilt- 



14 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

spur Street, Hosier Lane and Cock Lane, the corner 
of which is the veritable Pie Corner which was once 
occupied by a famous eating-house of that name 
and surrounded by cooks' stalls and refreshment 
tents whilst the Fair was on. The Great Fire of 
London, which began at Pudding Lane, in East- 
cheap, ended by burning down the ancient hostelry 
at Pie Corner, and a tavern called " The Fortune 
of War," which stood on the site until about a year 
ago, exhibited the gilded figure of an obese boy 
above its doorway, with an inscription to the effect 
that it was erected in memory of " the late Fire of 
London, occasioned by the sin of gluttony, 1666." 
I am glad that the new building now reared on 
the spot preserves this historic boy in a niche at his 
familiar corner. There used to be many inns here- 
abouts that were closely associated with the Fair, 
but all these are demolished or have been rebuilt and 
changed their names, except The Crown, two doors 
from Hosier Lane, where, according to Stow, writ- 
ing in 1589, " the hosiers of old time " carried on 
their businesses. 

There exist in the Guildhall or British Museums 
quaint seventeenth-century advertisements and hand- 
bills from which you may gather something of the 
wonders exhibited at the Fair, such as : 

" Just arrived from abroad and are to be seen or sold at 
the first house on the pavement from the end of Hosier Lane, 
during Bartholomew Fair — A large and beautiful young Camel 
from Grand Cairo, in Egypt. This Creature is twenty-three 
years old ; his head and neck are like those of a deer ; " and 

"At Mr Croome's, at the sign of the Shoe and Slap, near 
the Hospital Gate in West Smithfield, is to be seen The Wonder 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 15 

of Nature, a Girl above sixteen years of age, born in Cheshire, 
and not above eighteen inches long, having shed the teeth 
seven several times, and not a perfect bone in any part of her, 
only the Head, yet she hath all her senses to Admiration, and 
Discourses. Reads very well, sings, whistles, and all very 
pleasant to hear ; " and 

■' At the corner of Hosier Lane, and near Mr. 
Parker's booth, there is to be seen a Prodigious 
Monster lately brought over by Sir Thomas Grantham 
from the great Mogul's country, being a Man with 
one Head and two distinct Bodies, both Mascu- 
line ; there is also with him his Brother, who is a 
priest of the Mahometan Religion. Price Sixpence 
and One Shilling the best Places ; " and there are 
announcements of an Indian King to be seen at the 
Golden Lyon, near the Hospital Gate ; of a Little 
Fairy Woman " at the Hart's Horn in Pye Corner" ; 
of a Giant Man on show "■ between Hosier Lane and 
the Swan Tavern, at the Saddler's shop " ; of " most 
excellent and incomparable performances in Danc- 
ing on the Slack Rope " at "Mr. Barnes's and Mr. 
Appleby's Booth, between the Crown Tavern and 
the Hospital Gate ; " and among the many faded 
bills of the plays acted in the Fair is one announc- 
ing performances of "an excellent new Droll called 
' The Tempest, or the Distressed Lovers,' " at 
Miller's Booth over against the Cross Daggers, near 
the Crown Tavern. The ground was thickly strewn 
with such Freak Shows and Theatrical Booths, and 
there are ample records of these, and of the show- 
men and the actors ; Pepys tells you of how he and 
his friends would go there ; and one likes to think 
of Ben Jonson loitering about Smithfield among 



16 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

the sights and sounds of the Fair and one day sitting 
down to write that play of Bartholomew Fair in 
which, for the first time and for ever, some of the 
multitude that struggled and elbowed each other 
there and fought for places in the booths and round 
the refreshment stalls of Pie Corner were individual- 
ised and made as actual for us as any of the real 
men and women who belong to the history of the 
place. 

Jonson had no sympathy with Puritanism, and 
he makes occasion in his comedy for some incidental 
satire of the worst features of that sect, then in its 
infancy, but in a generation or so to rise full-grown 
and become the ruling spirit of the nation. His 
first scene opens in the house of John Littlewit, a 
lawyer. Littlewit has had a hand in writing a play 
which is to be performed in one of the booths at 
Bartholomew Fair, and he is anxious to go and see 
it and to take his wife, Win-the-Fight Littlewit, 
with him. But she is much under the influence of 
her Puritanical mother, the widow Purecraft, who 
lives with them, and both women are largely 
dominated by the hypocritical Puritan preacher, 
Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, who has secret designs of 
marrying the widow for her money : 

" Win, you see, 'tis the fashion to go to the Fair, 
Win," argues Littlewit ; " we must to the Fair, 
too, you and I, Win. I have an affair in the Fair, 
Win, a puppet-play of mine own making, say no- 
thing, that I writ for the motion-man, which you 
must see, Win." " I would I might, John," answers 
Mrs. Littlewit ; " but my mother will never consent 
to such a profane motion, she will call it." " Tut, 




•=-yrf s » 



Entrance to 

f)AR.TH0L0M6W dost ■ 

fredf-Aclcock ■ 



The old, old house that rises, looking as if it were built oj the very stuff of d?'eams, 
above the gateway of Bartholomew Church." 

Chapter i 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 17 

we'll have a device, a dainty one/' he protests. . . . 
1 1 have it, Win, I have it, i' faith, and 'tis a fine 
one. Win, long to eat of a pig, sweet Win, in the 
Fair, do you see, in the heart of the Fair, not at 
Pye-corner. Your mother will do anything, Win, 
to satisfy your longing, you know." 

And this device is successful. Before consenting, 
Mrs. Purecraft consults her adviser, Zeal-of-the- 
Land Busy, a forerunner of Mr. Chadband, and he, 
having private hankerings after the flesh-pots, is 
won over not only to seeing how a visit to the Fair 
may be allowable but into accompanying the party 
for their better guidance. He expounds : 

" Now pig, it is a meat, and a meat that is nourishing and 
may be longed for, and so consequently eaten ; it may be eaten ; 
very exceeding well eaten ; but in the Fair, and as a Bartholo- 
mew pig, it cannot be eaten ; for the very calling it a Bartholo- 
mew pig, and to eat it so, is a spice of idolatry, and you may 
make the Fair no better than one of the high-places. This, I 
take it, is the state of the question : a high-place. . . . Surely 
it may be otherwise, but it is subject to construction, subject, 
and hath a face of offence with the weak, a great face, a foul 
face ; but that face may have a veil put over it and be shadowed 
as it were ; it may be eaten, and in the Fair, I take it, in a 
booth, in the tents of the wicked ; the place is not much, not 
very much, we may be religious in the midst of the profane, 
so it be eaten with a reformed mouth, with sobriety and 
humbleness; not gorged in with gluttony and greediness, 
there's the fear ; for, should she go there as taking pride in 
the place, or delight in the unclean dressing, to feed the vanity 
of the eye, or lust of the palate, it were not well, it were not fit, 
it were abominable, and not good. ... In the way of comfort 
to the weak, I will go and eat. I will eat exceedingly, and 
prophesy ; there may be good use made of it too, now I think 
on't ; by the public eating of swine's flesh, to profess our 
2 



18 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

hating and loathing of Judaism, whereof the brethren stand 
taxed. I will therefore eat, yea, I will eat exceedingly." 

Thereafter, through all the scenes of the next four 
acts, you find Littlewit, his wife, his mother-in-law 
and the Puritan preacher roaming about Smithfield, 
playing their parts in a good story that develops 
amidst the hubbub and jollity of the Fair. Apart 
from two or three of the gentry and their servants 
intimately concerned in the story, the characters 
are the puppet-show men, a dupe who keeps one 
of the clothier's stalls in Bartholomew Close, toy- 
sellers, a wrestler, a pickpocket, a beadle, watchmen, 
cooks, eating-house keepers, a man connected with 
the horse fair, a ballad singer and members of the 
general rabble. You have a glimpse of the per- 
formance in one of the puppet-shows, you see some- 
thing of the rascalities, the trickeries, the feasting, 
the buying and selling, the uproarious merriment, 
the broad humours and all the fun of the Fair, and 
from time to time the air fills with the multifarious 
cries and the noise of it. A number of people come 
straggling past and Leatherhead, the toyman, breaks 
out at once : 

" Leatherhead. What do you lack ? What is't you buy ? 
What do you lack ? Rattles, drums, halberts, horses, babies 
o' the best, fiddles of the finest ? 

Enter Costardmonger, followed by Nightingale (the 
ballad-monger). 

Costard. Buy any pears, pears, very fine pears ! 
Joan Trash. Buy any gingerbread, gilt ginger-bread ! 
Nightingale. Hey ! (Sings) 

Now the Fair's a-filling ! 
0, for a tune to startle 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 19 

The birds o' the booths here'billing 
Yearly with old saint Bartle ! 
The drunkards they are wading, 
The punks and chapmen trading ; 
Who'd see the fair without his lading ? 

Buy any ballads, new ballads ? " 

But all these and thousands of other such voices 
have passed into the silence, and in 1855, after over 
seven hundred years of lusty life, Bartholomew 
Fair came to an end. Wordsworth saw something 
of it in its latter years, and you may picture him, 
a curiously alien figure, straying about in its pande- 
monium, to go home and by and by, amid the quiet 
of his Westmorland hills, put his recollections of it 
into The Prelude, when he comes to discourse on his 
residence in London : 

What anarchy and din 
Barbarian and informal, a phantasma 
Monstrous in colour, motion, shape, sight, sound ! 
Below, the open space, through every nook 
Of the wide area, twinkles, is alive 
With heads ; the midway region, and above, 
Is thronged with staring pictures and huge scrolls, 
; Dumb proclamations of the Prodigies ; 

With chattering monkeys dangling from their poles, 
And children whirling in their roundabouts. . . 
The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire, 
Giants, ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl, 
The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes, 
The Waxwork, Clockwork, all the marvellous craft 
Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet Shows. . . . 

Strange, to pace the drab, busy neighbourhood 
now and remember all the Fairs it has held and get 



20 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

the noise of them back into the air and feel the 
motley multitudes of them billowing and crushing and 
striving all about you here. Then, with a thought, 
you sweep them all aside, and picture that seventeenth 
century young ruffian, Defoe's Colonel Jack, coming 
from picking pockets in other parts of London to 
try his luck in Smithfield on a market day, his black- 
guard comrade Will being along with him : 

" It fell out one day that, as we were strolling about in West 
Smithfield on a Friday, there happened to be an ancient country 
gentleman in the market, selling some very large bullocks ; 
it seems they came out of Sussex. His worship, for so they 
called him, had received the money for these bullocks at a 
tavern, whose sign I forget now, and having some of it in a bag, 
and the bag in his hand, he was taken with a sudden fit of 
coughing, and stands to cough, resting his hand with the bag 
of money in it upon the bulk-head of a shop, just by the Cloister- 
gate in Smithfield, that is to say within three or four doors of 
it ; we were both just behind him. Says Will to me, ' Stand 
ready ; ' upon this, he makes an artificial stumble, and falls 
with his head just against the old gentleman, in the very 
moment when he was coughing, ready to be strangled, and 
quite spent for want of breath. 

" The violence of the blow beat the old gentleman quite 
down ; the bag of money did not immediately fly out of his 
hand, but I ran to get hold of it, and gave it a quick snatch, 
pulled it clean away and ran like the wind down the Cloisters 
with it, turned on the left hand, as soon as I was through, 
and out into Little Britain, so into Bartholomew Close, 
then across Aldersgate Street, through Paul's Alley into 
Redcross Street, and so across all the streets, through innumer- 
able alleys, and never stopped till I got into the second quarter 
of Moorfields, our old agreed rendezvous." 

You may follow Colonel Jack in his flight and find 
the streets he names, or you may select one of these 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 21 

ancient shops beside the Cloisters' gateway — shorn 
though they be of their bulkheads— as the one out- 
side which the incident took place. But you shall 
see Colonel Jack again in Smithfield. The officers 
are on the track of his friend Will, and it is agreed 
that the Colonel shall fetch away certain stolen 
plate and valuables concealed in his garret and sell 
them to raise money for Will to escape abroad : 

" If I should offer to sell it anywhere," said I, " they will 
stop me." 

" As for that," says Will, " I could sell it well enough if I 
had it, but I must not be seen anywhere among my old acquaint- 
ance, for I am blown, and they will betray me ; but I will 
tell you where you shall go and sell it, if you will, and they 
will ask you no questions, if you give them the word that I 
will give you." So he gave the word, and directions to a 
pawnbroker near Cloth Fair ; the word was Good tower standard. 
Having these instructions, he said to me, " Colonel Jack, I 
am sure you won't betray me ; and I promise you, if I am 
taken and should be hanged, I won't name you. I will go to 
such a house " (naming a house at Bromley by Bow, where he 
and I had often been), " and there," says he, " I'll stay till it 
is dark ; at night I will come near the streets, and I will lay 
under such a haystack all night " (a place we both knew also 
very well), " and if you cannot finish to come to me there, I 
will go back to Bow." 

I went back and took the cargo, went to the place by 
Cloth Fair, and gave the word, Good tower standard ; and with- 
out any words they took the plate, weighed it, and paid me 
after the rate of 2s. per ounce for it ; so I came away and went 
to meet him, but it was too late to meet him at the first place ; 
but I went to the haystack, and there I found him fast asleep. 

Probably that pawnbroker near Cloth Fair was in 
Long Lane, which runs parallel with the Fair and 



22 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

is connected with it by a narrow alley ; anyhow, 
Long Lane was for two or three hundred years 
famous for its pawnshops, second-hand clothiers 
and gaming houses. Jack Hornet, in Webster's 
Northward Ho ! having rigged himself out in a showy 
second-hand suit calls on his friends to admire his 
bravery, but Doll is a little ambiguous in her criticism 
and cries out, " Why, I tell thee, Jack Hornet, if 
the devil and all the brokers in Long Lane had rifled 
their wardrobe they would ha' been damned before 
they had fitted thee thus." 

Coming to later days you may read in Thackeray's 
Adventures of Philip how Philip's mother promised 
to go to the Charterhouse every Saturday to see him, 
and did not keep her promise. " Smithfield is a 
long way from Piccadilly ; and an angry cow once 
scratched the panels of her carriage, causing her 
footman to spring from his board into a pig-pen, 
and herself to feel such a shock that no wonder she 
was afraid of visiting the city afterwards." And 
in The New comes you go with stately old Colonel 
Newcome when he " dismissed his cab at Ludgate 
Hill and walked thence by the dismal precincts of 
Newgate, and across the muddy pavement of Smith- 
field, on his way back to the old school where his 
son was, a way which he had trodden many a time 
in his own early days." But there are closer and 
fuller associations with Smithfield in Oliver Twist 
and in Great Expectations. You remember how, after 
Oliver had escaped from Fagin, Nancy and Bill 
Sikes recaptured him one evening in Clerkenwell 
and hurried him away towards Fagin's den in 
Field Lane, passing near Newgate, in which certain 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 23 

of their friends lay under sentence of death. Let 
us re-read the whele passage : 

" The narrow streets and courts at length terminated in a 
large open space ; scattered about which were pens for beasts, 
and other indications of a cattle-market. Sikes slackened 
his pace when they reached this spot : the girl being quite 
unable to support any longer the rapid rate at which they 
had hitherto walked. Turning to Oliver he roughly com- 
manded him to take hold of Nancy's hand. 

" * Do you hear ? ' growled Sikes, as Oliver hesitated and 
looked round. 

" They were in a dark corner, quite out of the track of 
passengers. Oliver saw, but too plainly, that resistance 
would be of no avail. He held out his hand, which Nancy 
clasped tightly in hers. 

" ' Give me the other,' said Sikes, seizing Oliver's unoccupied 
hand. ' Here, Bull's-eye ! ' 

" The dog looked up and growled. 

" ' See here, boy ! ' said Sikes, putting his other hand to 
Oliver's throat ; ' if he speaks ever so soft a word, hold him ! 
D'ye mind ? ' 

" The dog growled again ; and licking his lips eyed Oliver 
as if he were anxious to attach himself to his windpipe without 
delay. 

" ' He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't ! ' 
said Sikes, regarding the animal with a kind of grim and ferocious 
approval. ' Now, you know what you've got to expect, 
master, so call away as quick as you like ; the dog will 
soon stop that game. Get on, young 'un ! ' 

" Bull's-eye wagged his tail in acknowledgement of this 
unusually endearing form of speech ; and, giving vent to 
another admonitory growl for the benefit of Oliver, led the 
way onward. 

" It was Smithfield that they were crossing, although it 
might have been Grosvenor Square for anything Oliver knew 
to the contrary. The night was dark and foggy. The lights 
in the shops could scarcely struggle through the heavy mist 



24 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

which thickened every moment and shrouded the streets and 
houses in gloom, rendering the strange place still stranger in 
Oliver's eyes, and making his uncertainty the more dismal 
and depressing. They had hurried on a few paces, when a 
deep church-bell struck the hour. With its first stroke, his 
two conductors stopped, and turned their heads in the direction 
whence the sound proceeded. 

" ' Eight o'clock, Bill,' said Nancy, when the bell ceased. 

" ' What's the good of telling me that ; I can hear it, can't 
I ? ' replied Sikes. 

" ' I wonder whether they can hear it,' said Nancy. 

" ' Of course they can,' replied Sikes. ' It was Bartlemy 
time when I was shopped, and there weren't a penny trumpet 
in the Fair as I couldn't hear the squeaking on. Arter I was 
locked up for the night the row and din outside made the 
thundering old jail so silent that I could almost have beat my 
head out against the iron plates of the door.' 

" ' Poor fellows ! ' said Nancy, who still had her face turned 
towards the quarter in which the bell had sounded. ' Oh, 
Bill, such fine young chaps as them ! ' 

" ' Yes ; that's all you women think of,' answered Sikes. 
1 Fine young chaps ! Well, they're as good as dead, so it don't 
much matter.' 

" With this consolation, Mr. Sikes appeared to repress a 
rising tendency to jealousy ; and clasping Oliver's wrist 
more firmly told him to step out again. 

" ' Wait a minute,' said the girl : ' I wouldn't hurry by if 
it was you that was coming out to be hung the next time 
eight o'clock struck, Bill. I'd walk round and round the place 
till I dropped, if the snow was on the ground and I hadn't a 
shawl to cover me.' 

" • And what good would that do ? ' inquired the unsenti- 
mental Mr. Sikes. ' Unless you could pitch over a file and 
twenty yards of good stout rope, you might as well be walking 
fifty mile off, or not walking at all, for all the good it would do 
me. Come on, will you, and don't stand preaching there.' " 

With that, he and Nancy, with Oliver and the dog 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 25 

move on beyond our radius and vanish into the fog. 
But a little later, on a cheerless morning when they 
set out towards Chert sey, where Oliver was forced 
to take part in that notorious burglary, he and Sikes 
passed this way again, and incidentally Dickens 
gives you a vivid picture of Smithfield as it was in 
the i83o's, when Oliver Twist was written : 

11 Turning down Sun Street and Crown Street, and crossing 
Finsbury Square, Mr. Sikes struck by way of Chiswell Street, 
into Barbican : thence into Long Lane : and so into Smith- 
field ; from which latter place arose a tumult of discordant 
sounds that filled Oliver Twist with surprise and amazement. 
It was market-morning. The ground was covered nearly 
ankle-deep with filth and mire ; and a thick steam, perpetually 
rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle and mingling with 
the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney tops, hung 
heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area : 
and as many temporary ones as could be crowded into the 
vacant space : were filled with sheep ; tied up to posts by the 
gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four 
deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, 
idlers and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together 
in a dense mass ; the whistling of drovers, the barking of dogs, 
the bellowing and plunging of oxen, the bleating of -sheep, 
the grunting and squeaking of pigs ; the cries of hawkers, 
the shouts, oaths and quarrelling on all sides ; the ringing of 
bells, and roar of voices that issued from every public-house ; 
the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling ; 
the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every 
corner of the market ; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid 
and dirty figures constantly running to and fro and bursting 
in and out of the throng ; rendered it a stunning and bewildering 
scene which quite confounded the senses. 

" Mr. Sikes, dragging Oliver after him, elbowed his way 
through the thickest of the crowd, and bestowed very little 
attention on the numerous sights and sounds which so astonished 



26 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

the boy. He nodded, twice or thrice, to a passing friend ; 
and, resisting as many invitations to take a morning dram, 
pressed steadily onward, until they were clear of the turmoil 
and had made their way through Hosier Lane into Holborn. 

" ' Now, young 'un ! ' said Sikes, looking up at the clock 
of St. Andrew's Church, ' hard upon seven ! You must step 
out. Come, don't lag behind already, Lazy -legs ! ' " 

Into Smithfield, from St. John Street Road, came 
Noah Claypole and his Charlotte, a weedy, grotesque 
couple, Charlotte carrying their bundle, and as they 
were making for that disreputable hostelry, The 
Three Cripples in Field Lane, where they also were 
to fall in with Fagin, it is probable that they turned 
off along Charterhouse Lane, now Charterhouse 
Street ; and in that same street, as you may learn 
from Pendennis, Mr. Huxter and his wife had lodg- 
ings. His wife, you remember, was that pretty 
Fanny Bolton, daughter of the porter of Shepherd's 
Inn ; Pendennis himself had been wildly in love 
with her for a while, and whilst he cooled his passion 
resolutely in absence, Fanny consoled herself with 
Huxter, a medical student at St. Bartholomew's, 
in Smithfield, and after their marriage he brought 
the news to Pendennis, and invited him to call and 
see them : 

" It's in Charterhouse Lane, over the baker's, on the right 
hand side as you go from St. John's Street," as old Bows who 
happens to be present explains. " You know Smithfield, 
Mr. Pendennis ? St. John's Street leads into Smithfield. Dr. 
Johnson has been down the street many a time with ragged 
shoes and a bundle of penny-a-lining for the Gent's Magazine. 
You literary gents are better off now — eh ? You ride in your 
cabs and wear yellow kid gloves now." 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 27 

St. John's Street (now St. John's Lane) still retains 
something of its old-world atmosphere, and in it 
still is the ancient gateway in the room over which 
Johnson, because of his shabbiness, used to take a 
meal behind a screen, whilst his employer, the pub- 
lisher Cave, was entertaining more affluent guests 
at dinner. But it is no use looking for that baker's 
shop, for Charterhouse Lane is all gone, and its suc- 
cessor, Charterhouse Street, is made up of raw new 
buildings on the right hand, and the long, low, red- 
brick modern Market on the left. 

When Nicholas Nickleby travelled with Mr. Squeers 
to Dotheboys Hall he started from the Saracen's 
Head, on Snow Hill, which is out at the other end 
of Hosier Lane, and the coach came u rattling over 
the stones of Smithfield " on its way to Islington. 
And when Pip, in Great Expectations, came to London, 
the coach set him down at the Cross Keys, Wood 
Street, off Cheapside, about five minutes' walk from 
the office of that remarkable solicitor, Mr. J aggers : 

" Mr. Jaggers had duly sent me his address ; it was Little 
Britain, and he had written after it on his card, ' just out of 
Smithfield and close by the coach-office.' Nevertheless, a 
hackney coachman, who seemed to have as many capes to 
his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me up in his 
coach, and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier 
of steps, as if he were going to take me fifty miles. His getting 
on his box, which I remember to have been decorated with an 
old weather-stained pea-green hammercloth, moth-eaten into 
rags, was quite a work of time. It was a wonderful equipage, 
with six great coronets outside, and ragged things behind 
for I don't know how many footmen to hold on by, and a 
harrow below them to prevent amateur footmen from yielding 
to the temptation. I had scarcely had time to enjoy the 



28 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

coach and to think how like a straw-yard it was, and yet how 
like a rag-shop, when I observed the coachman beginning to 
get down, as if we were going to stop presently. And stop we 
presently did, in a gloomy street, at certain offices with an open 
door, whereon was painted Mr. J aggers. 

" ' How much ? ' I asked the coachman. 

" The coachman answered, * A shilling — unless you wish to 
make it more.' 

" I naturally said I did not wish to make it more. 

" ' Then it must be a shilling,' observed the coachman. ' I 
don't want to get into trouble, I know him ! ' He darkly closed 
an eye at Mr. Jaggers's name, and shook his head." 

There are some old houses near this end of Little 
Britain any one of which would serve as Mr. Jaggers's. 
As that gentleman chanced to be out Pip decided 
to take a walk and come back, and the clerk advised 
him "to go round the corner and I should come 
into Smithfield. So I came into Smithfield ; and 
the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and 
fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So 
I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning 
into a street where I saw the great black dome of 
St. Paul's bulging at me from behind a grim stone 
building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison." 
Smithfield is no longer the littered, dirty, noisome 
spot it was in Pip's day ; its whole traffic nowadays 
is in dead meat which is sold with noise enough but 
in cleanly and orderly fashion within the Market- 
walls, the live sheep and cattle going farther north 
to Caledonian Market, where they are disposed 
of in a seemly environment and slaughtered as 
decently and scientifically as may be in sanitary 
abbatoirs. Returning from his walk round New- 
gate, says Pip ; 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 29 

" I dropped into the office J:o ask if Mr. Jaggers had come in 
yet, and I found he had not, and I strolled out again. This 
time I made the tour of Little Britain, and turned into Bartholo- 
mew Close ; and now I became aware that other people were 
waiting about for Mr. Jaggers, as well as I. There were two 
men of secret appearance lounging in Bartholomew Close, 
and thoughtfully fitting their feet into the cracks of the pave- 
ment as they talked together, one of whom said to the other 
when they first passed me, that ' Jaggers would do it if it was 
to be done.' There was a knot of three men and two women 
standing at a corner, and one of the women was crying on 
her dirty shawl, and the other comforted her by saying, as 
she pulled her own shawl over her shoulders, ' Jaggers is for 
him, 'Melia, and what more could you have ? ' There was a 
red-eyed little Jew who came into the Close while I was loitering 
there, in company with a second little Jew whom he sent 
upon an errand ; and while the messenger was gone, I remarked 
this Jew, who was of a highly excitable temperament, per- 
forming a jig of anxiety under a lamp-post, and accompanying 
himself, in a kind of frenzy, with the words, ' Oh, Jaggerth, 
Jaggerth, Jaggerth ! all otherth ith Cag-Maggerth, give me 
Jaggerth ! ' These testimonies to the popularity of my 
guardian made a deep impression on me, and I wondered 
and wondered more than ever. 

" At length, as I was looking out at the iron gate of Bartholo- 
mew Close into Little Britain, I saw Mr. Jaggers coming across 
the road towards me. All the others who were waiting, saw 
him at the same time, and there was quite a rush at him. 
Mr Jaggers, putting a hand on my shoulder, and walking me 
at his side without saying anything to me, addressed himself 
to his followers. 

" First he took the two secret men. 

" ' Now, I have nothing to say to you/ said Mr. Jaggers, 
throwing his finger at them. ' I want to know no more than 
I know. As to the result, it's a toss-up. I told you from 
the first it was a toss-up. Have you paid Wemmick ? 

11 ' We made the money up this morning, sir,' said one of the 
men submissively, while the other perused Mr. Jaggers's face. 



30 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

" ' I don't ask when you made it up, or where, or whether 
you made it up at all. Has Wemmick got it ? ' 

" ' Yes, sir/ said both the men together. 

" ' Very well ; then you may go. Now, I won't have it ! ' 
said Mr. Jaggers, waving his hand at them, to put them behind 
him. ' If you say a word to me, I'll throw up the case.' 

" ' We thought, Mr. Jaggers — ■ one of the men began, 
pulling off his hat. 

" ' That's what I told you not to do,' said Mr. Jaggers. ' You 
thought ! I think for you ; that's enough for you. If I want 
you, I know where to find you ; I don't want you to find me. 
Now I won't have it. I won't hear a word.' 

" The two men looked at one another as Mr. Jaggers waved 
them behind again, and humbly fell back and we heard no more. 

" ' And now you 1 ' said Mr. Jaggers, suddenly stopping, and 
turning on the two women with the shawls, from whom the 
two men had meekly separated — ' Oh ! Amelia, is it ? ' 

" ' Yes, Mr. Jaggers.' 

" ' And do you remember,' retorted Mr. Jaggers, ' that but 
for me you wouldn't be here and couldn't be here ? ' 

" ' Oh, yes, sir ! ' exclaimed both women together. ' Lord 
bless you, sir, well we knows that ! ' 

" ' Then why,' said Mr. Jaggers, ' do you come here ? ' 

" ' My Bill, sir ! ' the crying woman pleaded. 

" ' Now, I tell you what ! ' said Mr. Jaggers. ' Once for all. 
If you don't know that your Bill's in good hands, I know it. 
And if you come here, bothering about your Bill, I'll make an 
example both of your Bill and you, and let him slip through 
my fingers. Have you paid Wemmick ? ' 

" ' Oh, yes, sir ! Every farden.' 

" ' Very well. Then you have done all you have got to do. 
Say another word — one single word — and Wemmick shall 
give you your money back.' 

" This terrible threat caused the women to fall off immediately. 
No one remained now but the excitable Jew, who had already 
raised the skirts of Mr. Jaggers's coat to his lips several times. 

""'I don't know this man ? ' said Mr. Jaggers, in the most 
devastating strain. ' What does this fellow want ? ' 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 31 

" * Ma thear Mithter Jaggerth. Hown brother to Habraham 
Latheruth ? ' 

" ' Who's he ? ' said Mr. Jaggers. ' Let go of my eoat.' 

" The suitor, kissing the hem of the garment again before 
relinquishing it, replied, ' Habratham Latharuth, on thuth- 
pithion of plate.' 

" ' You're too late/ said Mr. Jaggers. ' I am over the way.' 

" ' Holy father, Mithter Jaggerth ! ' cried my excitable 
acquaintance, turning white, ' don't thay you're again 
Habraham Latharuth ! ' 

" ' I am,' said Mr. Jaggers, ' and there's an end of it. Get 
out of the way.' 

" ' Mithter Jaggerth ! Half a moment ! My hown cuthen'th 
gone to Mithter Wemmick at thith prethenth minute to hoffer 
him hany termth. Mithter Jaggerth ! Half a quarter of a 
moment ! If you'd have the condethenthun to be bought off 
from the t'other thide — at any thuperior prithe ! — money no 
obj ect — Mithter Jaggerth — Mithter ' 

" My guardian threw his suppliant off with supreme in- 
difference, and left him dancing on the pavement as if it were 
red-hot. Without further interruption, we reached the front 
office." 

The only gateway now into Bartholomew Close 
is in front of the church ; but I believe there used 
to be a gateway at the other entrance along Little 
Britain, and it was at this corner of the Close, there- 
fore, that they left the Jew dancing on the pave- 
ment. And this was not Pip's only visit to the 
vicinity of Smithfield ; he was there again and again, 
and on one memorable occasion came from the office 
in Little Britain with Wemmick to walk westward 
and dine with Mr. Jaggers at his house in Gerrard 
Street, Soho ; and didn't he start from here, too, 
on the even more memorable occasion when he went 
home with Wemmick and made acquaintance with 



32 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

" the Ancient Parent " ? Strange, how as the years 
go by such unrealities become real and the world's 
realities become unreal. We know that on a certain 
June evening of 1381 Wat Tyler and his rebels 
marched into Smithfield to meet and parley with 
King Richard II. and his councillors ; that this is 
the historic ground on which Sir William Wal- 
worth treacherously stabbed Tyler whilst they were 
parleying, and that the dying rebel — a man whom 
history has grossly misjudged and maligned — 
was carried into Bartholomew's Hospital, whence 
his dead body was dragged next day that it might 
be decapitated and his head exhibited on London 
Bridge. But Tyler and Richard and their hosts 
are as very shadows as are Pip and Wemmick and 
Mr. J aggers, and Smithfield is as surely haunted by 
these figures that never existed as by those that 
have ceased to exist. 

Perhaps I have grown the more interested in all 
that concerns Smithfield because of a private and 
personal association I have with it. A few years 
ago I had occasion to search through some old London 
Directories. If we are to have the whole truth, I 
was at the time writing an article on Mr. William 
De Morgan and wanted to identify his birthplace, 
which had been renumbered, in a street that had 
been renamed. Glancing through the Directories 
between 1834 an( i x ^4 I casually came upon my 
own name : " Adcock, St. John. Sheep and Cattle 
Dealer, 41, West Smithfield ; " and guessed that, 
of course, this must be the grandfather after whom 
I had been named. I never knew him ; he died 
some twenty years before I was born, and was 




"^Sll!^ 



Fred^ddcock: 



" The hoztse was old, built of red bricks with a shell decoration over the door." 
Besanfs "All Sorts and Conditions of Men." Chapter 6 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 33 

younger then than I, his grandson, am at this writ- 
ing ; therefore he had never been more than a sort 
of tradition to me. I had heard stories of him when 
I was a youngster : he was a farmer near Oakham, 
and from time to time during the year he sent his 
drovers afoot with sheep and cattle to London, he 
himself starting a day or two later to travel up by 
coach and be at Smithfield Market by the time they 
arrived there. It was returning from one such 
journey that he was caught in the snowstorm that 
caused his death. Yet, somehow, I did not, except 
in the vaguest fashion, connect him with Smithfield 
until I lighted on his name in that old Directory ; 
then for the first time he became an actuality to 
me, with a local habitation. I found from certain 
old maps of West Smithfield in the 30's that 41 
used to stand on the southern side with its front 
windows looking across into Hosier Lane ; it was 
pulled down half a dozen years ago to make room 
for the extension of Bartholomew's Hospital ; and 
when I go by there now I have an eerie, an almost 
dreadful sense of nearness to that dead man who 
survives in me. I look across the road with his 
eyes, and see the same old houses he must have 
seen every time he came from the doorway of his 
office, and even though he died so long before I was 
born, when I am here it is easy now to come in touch 
with him. No doubt he saw something of the Fair 
in its later years, when the booths and freak-shows 
rose betwixt his windows and the red-tiled Crown 
Tavern opposite. He was doing business here in 
1837, whilst Dickens was publishing Oliver Twist, 
and knew Smithfield when it was exactly as Dickens 



34 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

sketched it — exactly as Oliver and Bill Sikes saw 
it that misty morning as they pushed through the 
uproarious crowd and made their way among the 
cattle-pens, and turned up Hosier Lane, across the 
road, and went tramping up it, and will go tramping 
up it until Dickens is forgotten. 

Withal, this ancestor, who has thus become so 
vividly real to me, is not more real than Sikes and 
Oliver, than Pip and Mr. Jaggers, Colonel Jack, 
Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, and the other imaginary 
people who move amidst the myriad Smithfield 
ghosts of those who were once human and alive, 
and are as living now as they ; he is not more real 
to me than is Bardolph who, according to the Page 
in Henry IV., came into Smithfield to buy a horse 
for Falstaff ; he is certainly not more real than 
Falstaff who was arrested here in Giltspur Street 
at the suit of Mistress Quickly : she loitered here- 
abouts with Fang and Snare, the Sheriff's officers, 
waiting for Falstaff to put in an appearance, and 
assured them, " A' comes continually to Pie-corner 
— saving your manhoods — to buy a saddle. . . . 
Yonder he comes ; and that arrant malmsey-nose 
knave, Bardolph, with him. Do your offices, do your 
offices, Master Fang and Master Snare ; do me, do 
me, do me your offices ! " 

At this end of Giltspur Street, before we come to 
Pie Corner, by the way, is the site of the chemist's 
shop at which the hero of Marryat's Japhet in Search 
of a Father served his apprenticeship. One side of 
Giltspur Street runs flush with the side of Smith- 
field ; the other side ends in a corner, where the 
broken square of Smithfield begins to fall away 



PERSONAL AND GENERAL 35 

from it ; and here, as Japhet Newland tells you 
himself, was the home he was sent to from the 
Foundling Hospital : 

" The practitioner who thus took me by the hand was a 
Mr. Phineas Cophagus, whose house was most conveniently 
situated for business, one side of the shop looking upon Smith- 
field Market, the other presenting a surface of glass to the 
principal street leading out of the same market. It was a 
corner house, but not in a corner. On each side of the shop 
were two gin establishments, and next to them were two 
public-houses, and then two eating-houses, frequented by 
graziers, butchers and drovers. Did the men drink so much 
as to quarrel in their cups, who was so handy to plaster up 
the broken heads as Mr. Cophagus ? Did a fat grazier eat 
himself into an apoplexy, how very convenient was the ready 
lancet of Mr. Cophagus. Did a bull gore a man, Mr. Cophagus 
appeared with his diachylon and lint. Did an ox frighten a 
lady, it was in the back parlour that she was recovered from 
her syncope. Market-days were a sure market to my master ; 
and if an overdriven beast knocked down others, it only helped 
to set him on his legs." 

But not always ; for a day came when a noisy 
crowd of people went tearing past the shop. Mr. 
Cophagus, thinking they were in pursuit of a bull, 
ran out and stood on the pavement to stare after 
them, but it chanced to be the bull that was doing 
the pursuing, and it suddenly took the unfortunate 
chemist in the rear and flung him through his own 
window on to the counter inside, and then burst 
in at the doorway after him. Japhet and another 
apprentice pulled their master down behind the 
counter, and some butcher-boys captured the beast 
and dragged it out with the scales swinging on its 
horns. But Mr. Cophagus was so badly damaged 



36 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

that he had to call in a rival chemist to attend to 
his injuries, and one result of the catastrophe was 
the sale of his business to this rival, which left Japhet 
unemployed and free to fulfil a long-cherished desire 
and go in search of his unknown father. 

So miraculously haunted is all Smithfield that I 
have secret yearnings to spend a night in the old, 
old house that rises, looking as if it were built of the 
very stuff of dreams, above the gateway in front 
of Bartholomew Church. There is a sly, eerie, very 
little attic window at the top of it, and I am almost 
sure that if I could be up there peering out from it 
between twelve and one of some still, misty morning, 
I should see all the varied past of Smithfield reacted 
under my eyes, as they say a man can relive all the 
years of his own past in the tense minute of drown- 
ing. But I shall never risk making the experiment 
— for in my heart I am afraid to ; and you shall 
guess for yourself whether I am most afraid of seeing 
things or of not seeing them. 



CHAPTER II 

" the saracen's head " and newgate 

LEAVING Smithfield by Giltspur Street, we come 
to the corner of Newgate Street, with the new 
Sessions House, replacing the old Newgate Jail, 
across the road in front, and St. Sepulchre's church 
across the road to our right. It was St. Sepulchre's 
clock that Nancy and Sikes heard striking eight. 
The first martyr burnt in Smithfield in the reign of 
Queen Mary was John Rogers, vicar of this church ; 
it was St. Sepulchre's bell that for over two centuries 
was tolled whenever a prisoner was brought from 
Newgate for execution, and for nearly as long a 
period it was customary for the cart conveying the 
condemned man to Tyburn to stop before the church 
gate whilst a nosegay was presented to the prisoner. 
Some thoughtful merchant bequeathed a fund for 
this melancholy purpose ; and another, more morbid 
and less thoughtful, left another fund out of which 
the clerk was to be paid to go across the road, the 
night before an execution, toll a hand-bell (which 
is still preserved in the vestry) twelve times under 
the window of the condemned cell and recite a homily 
to the poor awakened wretch inside, reminding him 
he was to die in the morning and had better 
repent. Sixteen-St ring- Jack is said to have received 
his nosegay here, at the church gate, and you may 

37 



38 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

remember that other highwaymen heroes of Ains- 
worth's novels did not fail to receive a like delicate 
attention. 

Before Holborn Viaduct was erected, Pip would 
come up Holborn Hill from his rooms in Barnard's 
Inn whenever he went to call on Mr. J aggers. He 
travelled this same way too after he and Herbert 
Pocket shared chambers in the Temple, and I recall 
how the two came one morning during those terrible 
weeks when he had Magwitch, the convict, in hiding 
— Herbert quitting him here and continuing along 
Newgate Street to his business further in town. 
" Early next morning," goes the story, " we went 
out together, and at the corner of Giltspur Street 
by Smithfield, I left Herbert to go on his way 
into the city, and took my way to Little Britain." 
Before we follow on Herbert's track let us cross the 
road and stroll down Snow Hill, immediately on 
the other side of St. Sepulchre's, for half way down 
the hill is, or was, that famous coaching Inn, the 
Saracen's Head. It was a pleasant and pious thought 
to preserve the old name on the new building that 
has replaced it and to decorate its frontage with a 
bust of Dickens and statues of Nicholas Nickleby 
and Mr. Wackford S queers, for the Saracen's Head 
used to be Squeers's head-quarters when he was in 
London. At the foot of his advertisements for 
new pupils he would announce : " Mr. Squeers is in 
town, and attends daily, from one till four, at the 
Saracen's Head, Snow Hill ; " and on one occa- 
sion he added : " N.B. — An able assistant wanted. 
Annual salary £5. A Master of Arts would be pre- 
ferred." It was this addition to his announcement 



" SARACEN'S HEAD " AND NEWGATE 39 

that brought Nicholas to the Inn with his uncle, 
Ralph Nickleby, and he rode from here on the 
Saracen's Head coach to take up the appointment. 
Round by the Old Bailey, at that date, and along 
Newgate Street spread the straggling, disorderly 
Newgate Market, swarming with meat and fish and 
vegetable stalls ; and Fleet Market was down in 
the deep valley, where Farringdon Street runs now- 
adays spanned by the Viaduct. A quiet, dull, 
drearily respectable business neighbourhood now ; 
wholly unlike the Snow Hill of 1688, when John 
Bunyan died at a grocer's shop here ; and wholly 
unlike what it was too when Nicholas Nickleby saw 
it less than a century ago : 

" Snow Hill ! What kind of a place can the quiet towns- 
people who see the words emblazoned in all the legibility of 
gilt letters and dark shading on the north-country coaches, 
take Snow Hill to be ? All people have some undefined and 
shadowy notion of a place whose name is frequently before 
their eyes or often in their ears, and what a vast number of 
random ideas there must be perpetually floating about regarding 
this same Snow Hill. The name is such a good one. Snow 
Hill — Snow Hill, too, coupled with a Saracen's Head : picturing 
to us by a double association of ideas, something stern and 
rugged. A bleak desolate tract of country, open to piercing 
blasts and fierce wintry storms — a dark, cold and gloomy 
heath, lonely by day, and scarcely to be thought of by honest 
folks at night — a place which solitary wayfarers shun, and 
where desperate robbers congregate ; — this, or something like 
this, we imagine must be the prevalent notion of Snow Hill 
in those remote and rustic parts through which the Saracen's 
Head, like some grim apparition, rushes each day and night 
with mysterious and ghost-like punctuality, holding its swift 
and headlong course in all weathers, and seeming to bid defiance 
to the very elements themselves. 



40 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

" The reality is rather different, but by no means to be 
despised, notwithstanding. There, at the very core of London, 
in the heart of its business and animation, in the midst of a 
whirl of noise and motion : stemming as it were the giant 
currents of life that flow ceaselessly on from different quarters 
and meet beneath its walls, stands Newgate ; and in that 
crowded street on which it frowns so darkly — within a few 
feet of the squalid tottering houses — upon the very spot upon 
which the venders of soup and fish and damaged fruit are now 
plying their trades — scores of human beings, amidst a roar 
of sounds to which even the tumult of a great city is as nothing, 
four, six, or eight strong men at a time, have been hurried 
violently and swiftly from the world, when the scene has been 
rendered frightful with the excess of human life ; when curious 
eyes have glared from casement and housetop and wall and 
pillar, and when, in the mass of white and upturned faces, 
the dying wretch in his all-comprehensive look of agony 
has met not one — not one — that bore the impress of pity or 
compassion. 

" Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield 
also, and the Compter and the bustle and noise of the city ; 
and just on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus 
horses going eastwards seriously think of falling down on 
purpose, and where horses in hackney cabriolets going west- 
wards not unfrequently fall by accident, is the coach-yard of 
the Saracen's Head Inn, its portal guarded by two Saracens' 
heads and shoulders, which it was once the pride and glory 
of the choice spirits of this metropolis to pull down at night, 
but which have for some time remained in undisputed tranquil- 
lity ; possibly because this species of humour is now confined 
to St. James's parish, where door-knockers are preferred as 
being more portable, and bell-wires esteemed as convenient 
tooth-picks. Whether this be the reason or not, there they 
are, frowning upon you from each side of the gateway, and 
the Inn itself, garnished with another Saracen's Head, frowns 
upon you from the top of the yard ; while from the door of 
the hind boot of the red coaches that are standing therein 
there glares a small Saracen's Head with a twin expression 



" SARACEN'S HEAD " AND NEWGATE 41 

to the large Saracen's Head below, so that the general appear- 
ance of the pile is of the Saracenic order. 

" When you walk up the yard, you will see the booking- 
office on your left, and the tower of St. Sepulchre's church 
darting abruptly up into the sky on your right, and a gallery 
of bedrooms on both sides. Just before you, you will observe 
a long window with the words ' coffee-room ' legibly painted 
above it ; and looking out of that window you would have 
seen in addition, if you had gone at the right time, Mr. Wackf ord 
Squeers with his hands in his pockets." 

Later in the story you get another glimpse of the 
Saracen's Head when John Browdie is staying there, 
with Tilda his wife, and Nicholas visits it again to 
see them. But the only part of Dickens's descrip- 
tion that can still be identified is the view of St. 
Sepulchre's tower darting abruptly up into the sky 
on your right. The market is gone ; no crowds 
ever assemble now in the Old Bailey to witness a 
public execution, and the hill has been so levelled 
up and levelled down that no self-respecting horse 
would think of taking any notice of it. The Compter 
has gone, too : it used to stand in Giltspur Street 
where the long, low railings shut in the yard of the 
new Post Office buildings, which you may notice 
as we go back to the corner of Newgate Street. If 
that were Newgate Jail across the road, instead of 
merely the new Sessions House that has superseded 
it and reproduces something of its form, we might 
loiter here over the memories of such glamorous 
rascals as Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard : they 
both went hence on their last journey to Tyburn, 
and before he was captured for the last time, from 
the old prison the redoubtable Jack escaped over 



42 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

the roofs of the Newgate shops and reached the street 
by sneaking down through an attic window. We 
should have to linger over the memories of scores 
such as these who, since Fielding and Ainsworth 
made heroes of them, belong as much to fiction as 
to fact ; over the memories of as many more who 
belong to fact wholly, and of as many more who 
belong wholly to fiction ; but this is not the place 
that they knew. Not in this building was Esmond 
imprisoned; and not in this building did Dennis 
the hangman carry on his gruesome trade ; these 
are not the very doors that were burst open by 
Barnaby Rudge and the Gordon rioters ; nor are 
these the same walls that Nancy had in mind when 
she said she would walk round them all night if 
Sikes were shut within, as, a little later, Fagin was 
shut within them ; but still fronting the new Sessions 
House in the Old Bailey, survives a solitary ancient 
Inn from the windows o£ which members of the general 
public looked down to see Fagin hanged one morning, 
and hereabouts, opening on Newgate Street, was the 
narrow, grated window of the condemned cell in which 
the frantic Jew agonised all the night before : 

" He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. 
He had been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on 
the day of his capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen 
cloth. His red hair hung down upon his bloodless face ; his 
beard was torn and twisted into knots ; his eyes shone with a 
terrible light ; his unwashed flesh crackled with the fever that 
burnt him up. Eight— nine— ten. If it was not a trick to 
frighten him, and those were the real hours treading on each 
other's heels, where would he be when they came round again ! 
Eleven 1 Another struck, before the voice of the previous 



" SARACEN'S HEAD " AND NEWGATE 43 

hour had ceased to vibrate. At eight, he would be the only 
mourner in his own funeral train ; at eleven 

" Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so 
much misery and such unspeakable anguish, not only from the 
eyes, but too often and too long from the thoughts of men, 
never held so dread a spectacle as that. The few who lingered 
as they passed and wondered what the man was doing who 
was to be hanged tomorrow, would have slept but ill that night 
if they could have seen him. From early in the evening until 
nearly midnight, little groups of two and three presented 
themselves at the lodge-gate, and inquired with anxious faces 
whether any reprieve had been received. These being answered 
in the negative, communicated the welcome intelligence to 
clusters in the street, who pointed out to one another the door 
from which he must come out, and showed where the scaffold 
would be built and, walking with unwilling steps away, turned 
back to conjure up the scene. By degrees they fell off, one 
by one ; and for an hour, in the dead of night, the street was 
left to solitude and darkness. 

" The space before the prison was cleared, and a few strong 
barriers, painted black, had already been thrown across the 
road to break the pressure of the expected crowd, when Mr. 
Brownlow and Oliver appeared at the wicket, and presented 
an order of admission to the prisoner, signed by one of the 
sheriffs. They were immediately admitted into the lodge. 

" . . , Day was dawning when they again emerged. A 
great multitude had already assembled : the windows were 
filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the 
time ; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling and joking. Every- 
thing told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects 
in the very centre of all — the black stage, the cross-beam, 
the rope, and all the hideous apparatus." 

Nearly all those windows are gone, like the audience 
that sat in them ; but opposite the spot where the 
gallows used to be erected there still remains that 
old tavern, The King of Denmark, and you may be 



44 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

sure that some of those smokers and card-players 
sat at its open windows in the long past — not so 
long past as it ought to be, for the last execution 
outside Newgate took place less than fifty years 
ago — and looked down on the ghoulish mobs that 
gathered to enjoy those grisly tragedies of justice. 
But if it is hard to look along the staid business 
thoroughfare to-day and imagine that such things 
ever happened in it, I find it harder to realise that 
at this end of the Old Bailey, within a hundred yards 
of the site reserved to the gallows, was that squalid 
Green Arbour Court in which Goldsmith lived, yet 
at the very mention of his name there is a thin, 
melancholy echo trembling through the rumble of 
traffic and I can hear him again playing his flute 
there of evenings, forgetful of his debts and of his 
duns. Surely, next to the Tower, this ground on 
which Newgate stands is the grimmest, most darkly 
tragic square of earth in all London. It was easy 
enough to pull down the terrible old Jail and cart 
its stones away, but not so easy to cleanse its atmo- 
sphere and wipe out all its searing recollections — 
the atmosphere of its past envelops it for ever and 
its ghosts linger homeless to hover about the new 
building, so that a nameless gloom overshadows it 
and it begins to wear a brooding and a haunted air 
already. 

In Besant's eighteenth-century story, The Orange 
Girl, William Halliday, son of the Thames Street 
Merchant, Sir Peter Halliday, tells how his down- 
fall was compassed by his enemies and he was sent a 
prisoner to the Newgate of that time and of the rascally 
fashion in which the place was then conducted : 



" SARACEN'S HEAD " AND NEWGATE 45 

" A man must be made of brass or wrought-iron who can 
enter the gloomy portals of Newgate as a prisoner without a 
trembling of the limbs and a sinking of the heart. Not even 
consciousness of innocence is sufficient to sustain a prisoner, 
for, alas ! even the innocent are sometimes found guilty. 
Once within the first doors I was fain to lay hold upon the 
nearest turnkey or I should have fallen into a swoon ; a thing 
which, they tell me, happens with many, for the first entrance 
into prison is worse to the imagination even than the standing 
up in the dock to take one's trial in open court. There is, 
in the external aspect of the prison : in the gloom which hangs 
over the prison : in the mixture of despair and misery and 
drunkenness and madness and remorse which fills the prison, 
an air which strikes terror to the very soul. They took me 
into a large, vaulted ante-room, lit by windows high up, with 
the turnkey's private room opening out of it, and doors leading 
into the interior parts of the Prison. The room was filled 
with people waiting their turn to visit the prisoners ; they 
carried baskets and packages and bottles ; their provisions, 
in a word, for the Prison allows the prisoners no more than 
one small loaf of bread every day. Some of the visitors were 
quiet, sober people : some were women on whose cheeks lay 
tears : some were noisy, reckless young men, who laughed 
over the coming fate of their friends ; spoke of Tyburn Fair ; 
of kicking off the shoes at the gallows ; of dying game ; of 
Newgate music — meaning the clatter of irons ; of whining 
and snivelling, and so forth. They took in wine, or perhaps 
rum under the name of wine. There were also girls whose 
appearance and manner certainly did not seem as if sorrow 
and sympathy with the unfortunate had alone brought them 
to this place. Some of the girls also carried bottles of wine 
with them in baskets." 

The Governor having ordered him to be taken in 
and ironed, Halliday admitted, to the great disgust 
of the turnkey, that he had no money, and as he 
could not pay to be accommodated comfortably on 



46 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

the State side, or on the Master's side of the prison, 
he had to herd with the general swarm of poor 
criminal wretches who were granted no privileges 
because they could not afford to buy any : 

" The common side of Newgate is a place which, though 
I was in it no more than two hours or so, remains fixed in my 
memory and will stay there as long as life remains. The 
yard was filled to overflowing with a company of the vilest, 
the filthiest, the most shameless that it is possible to imagine. 
They were pickpockets, footpads, shoplifters, robbers of every 
kind ; they were in rags ; they were unwashed and unshaven ; 
some of them were drunk ; some of them emaciated by in- 
sufficient food — a penny loaf a day was doled out to those who 
had no money and no friends : that was actually all that the 
poor wretches had to keep body and soul together ; the place 
was crowded not only with the prisoners, but with their friends 
and relations of both sexes ; the noise, the cursings, the ribald 
laugh ; the drunken song ; the fighting and quarrelling can 
never be imagined. And in the narrow space of the yard, 
which is like the bottom of a deep well, there is no air moving, 
so that the stench is enough, at first, to make a horse sick. 
I can liken it to nothing but a sty too narrow for the swine 
that crowded it ; so full of unclean beasts was it, so full of 
noise and pushing and quarrelling ; so full of passions, jealousies, 
and suspicions ungoverned, was it. Or I would liken it to a 
chamber in hell when the sharp agony of physical suffering 
is for a while changed for the equal pains of such companionship 
and such discourse as those of the Common side. I stood 
near the door as the turnkey had pushed me in, staring stupidly 
about. Some sat on the stone bench with tobacco-pipes and 
pots of beer : some played cards on the bench : some walked 
about : there were women visitors, but not one whose face 
showed shame or sorrow. To such people as these Newgate 
is like an occasional attack of sickness ; a whipping is but one 
symptom of the disease : imprisonment is the natural cure 
of the disease ; hanging is the only natural, common and 



" SARACEN'S HEAD " AND NEWGATE 47 

inevitable end when the disease is incurable, just as death in 
his bed happens to a man with fever." 

It was the custom for a new prisoner to pay his 
footing, and as Halliday was penniless, the other 
prisoners fell upon him violently and stripped him of 
his coat and waistcoat, shoes and stockings, that they 
might sell these and divide the proceeds. I think 
it should chasten the highest and most respectable 
of us to reflect that this was the best our ruling 
caste could do in the way of managing a Prison 
not a century and a half ago ; for the picture is 
a perfectly true one though the characters in it 
are fictitious. You have glimpses of a similar 
state of affairs in the Newgate scenes of Fielding's 
satirical masterpiece, Jonathan Wild ; and the plain 
contemporary records of fact show that neither he 
nor Besant exaggerated. Later in The Orange Girl 
there is a vivid description of a trial at the Old 
Bailey ; but for a more dramatic and far more 
memorable trial-scene you must turn to A Tale 
of Two Cities — for it was at the Old Bailey that 
Sydney Carton stood up in Court and secured the 
acquittal of the accused, on a point of identity, by 
calling attention to the astonishing facial resemblance 
betwixt himself and Charles Darnay. 

There is a striking Newgate jail scene in Besant's 
other eighteenth-century novel, No Other Way, 
where the pretty, shrinking widow, Mrs Weyland, 
comes here to marry the negro who is condemned 
to be executed to-morrow — she is hopelessly in debt, 
and in the event of her marrying, the law would 
then transfer all responsibility for her debts to her 
husband. And there is a good account of a trial 



48 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

at the Old Bailey of comparatively recent years 
in The Three Clerks, but Trollope rather mars the 
value and the effect of it by confessing that he had 
never seen the place he is describing ; moreover, 
we have loitered too long about this scandalous 
old Jail that has been tardily converted into a 
simple Sessions House. No wonder Besant's William 
Halliday, telling of how in his younger days he 
married gentle little Alice Shirley, as poor as him- 
self, and they went on a cheap honeymoon-walk 
round London, wrote of it like this : " From St. 
Paul's we walked up the narrow street called the 
Old Bailey and saw the outside of Newgate. Now 
had we known what things we were to do and suffer 
in that awful place, I think we should have prayed 
for death." 

Were we concerned for London's association with 
persons who have lived in the flesh, we could not 
pass up Newgate Street without having much to 
say of Christ's Hospital which, until it was recently 
replaced by a block of the new Post Office, rose on 
our left, behind its railings, scarce altered from the 
days when it numbered Lamb, and Coleridge, and 
Leigh Hunt among its scholars ; nor without more 
than a casual glance across the road at that glamor- 
ous tavern, " The Salutation and Cat," which stands 
there for ever to the lover of Lamb, though the mere 
eye may no longer perceive it, with Lamb himself 
and Coleridge and Hazlitt for ever holding session 
in its snug parlour. These matters, however, are 
not for us ; but we will, if you like, go a little way 
into Warwick Lane, to the street in which Probus, 
the villainous attorney of The Orange Girl — the man 







jt\mimjHKiVin 




JoMDOM Stoms. 

(a^JHNON STR.66T. 
Fred^/ldcock - 



Shakes/eare hail the warrant of Holinshed's Chronicle for 7naking Cade strike 
London Stone and declare himself lord of the City." 

Chapter 7 



11 SARACEN'S HEAD " AND NEWGATE 49 

who was mainly responsible for landing Halliday 
in Newgate — had his offices : 

" Mr. Probus wrote from a house in White Hart Street. It 
is a small street, mostly inhabited by poulterers, which leads 
from Warwick Lane to Newgate Market : a confined place 
at best : with rows of birds dangling on the hooks, not always 
of the sweetest, and the smell of the meat market close by 
and the proximity of the shambles, it is a dark and noisome 
place. The house, which had a silver Pen for its sign, was 
narrow, and of three stories : none of the windows had been 
cleaned for a long time, and the door and doorposts wanted 
paint. . . . The door was opened by an old man much bent 
and bowed with years : his thin legs, his thin arms, his body- 
all were bent : on his head he wore a small scratch wig : he 
covered his eyes with his hand on account of the blinding light, 
yet the court was darkened by the height of the houses above 
and the dangling birds below." 

There are no dangling birds here nowadays, and 
no poulterers' shops at all; but there is the same 
narrow street, though all its houses are changed, 
and it would still run into Newgate Market, only 
that the Market has given place to Paternoster 
Square, and publishers have supplanted the butchers 
and the poulterers. 

Firk, in Dekker's comedy, The Shoemaker's Holi- 
day, remarks that " a mess of shoemakers meet 
at the Woolsack in Ivy Lane " — here is Ivy Lane, 
but it is no use going down, for the Woolsack has 
vanished from it. Pass the Lane, however, and 
at the city end of Newgate Street is Panyer Alley, 
leading into Paternoster Row : a pinched little 
lane that has been here ever since the fourteenth 
century or thereabouts. Stow speaks of it as a 



50 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

passage out of Paternoster Row, " called of such 
a sign, Panyar Alley, which cometh out into the 
north over against St. Martin's Lane " (known to us 
as St. Martin's le Grand). It was the place where 
panyers, or bread-baskets, were sold when the bakers 
congregated near by in Bread Street, Cheapside. 
"If I could meet one of these varlets who wear 
Pannier-alley on their backs," cries Monopoly, in 
Webster's Westward Ho I "I would make them 
scud so fast from me that they should think it a 
shorter way between this and Ludgate than a con- 
demned cutpurse thinks it between Newgate and 
Tyburn ! " But all the Alley has been modernised 
except the sign after which Stow says it was named : 
this you shall see built into one of the new walls 
and covered with glass. It is a crude sculpture of 
a boy seated on a panyer, is dated August the 27th, 
1688 (whence I take it the sign must have been re- 
stored and redated, for Stow wrote nearly a century 
earlier), and proclaims in ancient lettering : " When 
you have sought the city round, yet still this is the 
highest ground." Niggling sticklers for accuracy 
have taken measurements and insist that some 
part of Cornhill rises a foot higher, but I am not 
so hungry for facts as all that, and we will go 
on our way with an easy and an open mind on the 
question. 



CHAPTER III 

THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 

AT the top of Cheapside a blackened statue of 
Peel stands on a heavy pedestal and gazes 
blandly into one of the most famous streets in the 
world. I admire the good Sir Robert and like him 
in his proper place, but when you awake to all the 
romance that glorifies Cheapside you realise that 
this is no place for such a man as Peel. There is 
no magic about him ; he will stare along the street 
until he crumbles away and never see anything but 
the traffic in it ; he is as strange and lost among its 
best memories as Bottom the Weaver was in fairy- 
land. It should have been some great dreamer up 
there on the pedestal, not a party politician ; it 
should have been Shakespeare, for instance, because 
of his association with the " Mermaid/' which stood 
in Cheapside between Bread Street and Friday 
Street, and carved around his pedestal should have 
been figures of Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, 
Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others of that im- 
mortal company who used to assemble at the " Mer- 
maid " with him. Or it should have been Dickens, 
for all London belongs to him, and he belongs to all 
London ; wherever you go about its streets, you 
can never get away from him and, better still, you 
never want to. 

61 



52 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Up the first turning on your left, Foster Lane, 
is " the very narrow street somewhere behind the 
Post Office " (which is being pulled down while I 
write) that contained the business premises of 
Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son, Manchester Ware- 
housemen. But before you get so far as to Foster 
Lane, directly you turn into Cheapside, you will 
meet Pip again, out of Great Expectations. Early 
one afternoon, he tells you, " I had strolled up into 
Cheapside, and was strolling along it, surely the 
most unsettled person in all the busy concourse, 
when a large hand was laid upon my shoulder, by 
someone overtaking me. It was Mr. Jaggers's hand, 
and he passed it through my arm. 'As we are 
going in the same direction, Pip, we may walk to- 
gether. Where are you bound for ? ' " Pip was 
in doubt, so he consented to dine with Mr. Jaggers, 
" and we went along Cheapside and slanted off to 
Little Britain/ ' this end of which lies up in St. 
Martin's le Grand. But earlier than this, when 
he first arrived in London, Pip came by the coach 
to the Cross Keys, Wood Street ; and, also before 
that meeting in Cheapside with Mr. Jaggers, he was 
round here in Wood Street to meet the coach that 
was to bring Estella to town : 

" If there had been time, I should probably have ordered 
several suits of clothes for this occasion ; but as there was 
not, I was fain to be content with those I had. My appetite 
vanished instantly, and I knew no peace or rest until the 
day arrived. Not that its arrival brought me either ; for then 
I was worse than ever, and began haunting the coach-office 
in Wood Street, Cheapside, before the coach had left the Blue 
Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 53 

still felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of 
my sight longer than five minutes at a time ; and in this con- 
dition of unreason I had performed the first half-hour of a 
watch of four or five hours, when Wemmick ran against me. 

" ' Hallo, Mr. Pip/ said he, ' how do you do ? I should hardly 
have thought this was your beat.' 

" I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was 
coming up by coach, and I inquired after the Castle and the 
Aged." 

Finding he had time to spare, Wemmick invited 
him to occupy the interval by going with him to 
" have a look at Newgate ; " and they passed out 
together up Cheapside to Newgate Street and went 
through the Jail, interviewing those prisoners in 
whom Mr. J aggers was interested. Pip escaped 
from Wemmick and got back to the Cross Keys in 
Wood Street, still " with some three hours on hand ; " 
but at last the coach came, and he saw Estella's 
face at the window and her hand waving to him. 

There is no Cross Keys in Wood Street now ; you 
may learn from old directories that it was six doors 
beyond the corner of Goldsmith Street there, and 
though it is gone and commonplace warehouses cover 
its site, who can pass the spot without seeing Pip 
hover about it in that eager impatience, without 
seeing Wemmick come upon him there, without 
seeing the coach drive up with Estella's face at the 
window ? And I remember how they dined together 
at the Inn whilst a carriage was fetched for her. 

But Wood Street swarms with other memories. 
Donne was born in it ; Shakespeare lived for several 
years at the corner of Silver Street, near the 
northern end of it. And in Wood Street was the 



54 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Compter, one of the city's debtors' prisons. Tenter- 
hook, in Webster's Westward Ho ! bids his servant, 
" Bring a link and meet me at the Counter in Wood 
Street ; " and Ben Jonson lays a scene of Every Man 
Out of his Humour in " The Counter," where Fas- 
tidious Brisk is a prisoner, and Fallace goes to visit 
him, sighing, " O, master Fastidious, what a pity 
is it to see so sweet a man as you are in so sour a 
place ! " Also in Wood Street was The Mitre tavern 
(there is still a queer furtive Mitre Court there, nearly 
opposite where the Cross Keys was) in which Jonson 
places two scenes of that same play of his, Puntar- 
volo, recommending it as a rendezvous, for " Your 
Mitre is your best house." It was another gathering 
place of the wits, as you glimpse from a passage in 
Bartholomew Fair, where Littlewit inveighs against 
those " pretenders to wit, your Three Cranes, Mitre, 
and Mermaid men ! not a corn of true salt, not 
a grain of right mustard amongst them all. They 
may stand for places, or so, again the next witfall, 
and pay twopence in a quart more for their canary 
than other men. But give me the man can start up 
a justice of wit out of six shillings beer, and give the 
law to all the poets and poet-suckers in town : — 
because they are the players gossips ! " Pepys 
knew The Mitre, before it was destroyed in the Great 
Fire, and notes, on the 18th September 1660 : "To 
the Miter taverne in Wood Streete (a house of the 
greatest note in London)." On the 31st July 1665 
another entry in his Diary tells that " Proctor the 
vintner of the Miter in Wood Street, and his son, 
are dead this morning there, of the plague ; he 
having laid out abundance of money there, and 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 55 

was the greatest vintner for some time in London 
for great entertainments/ ' And in the remnant 
of an old churchyard at the Cheapside corner of 
Wood Street still survives the tree that reminds 
you at once of Wordsworth's " Reverie of Poor 
Susan " : 

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, 
There's a thrush that sings loud — it has sung for three years : 
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard 
In the silence of morning the song of the bird. 

'Tis a note of enchantment ; what ails her ? She sees 
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees ; 
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, 
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. . . . 

All our literature is thick-sown with references 
to Cheapside. If you go back to the beginning of 
the fifteenth century, when it was Westcheap, and 
already a famous market-street, you have Lydgate, 
in his London Lackpenny, telling how he came to 
town, passed through Westminster, and 

Then to the Chepe I began me drawn, 
Where much people I saw for to stand : 
One offered me velvet, silk and lawn, 
Another he taketh me by the hand : 
' Here is Paris thread, the finest in the land.' 
I never was used to such things indeed ; 
And wanting money I might not speed. 

But nowhere is London more freely or familiarly 
used than in the Elizabethan plays ; it has never 
had truer or heartier lovers than the old Dramatists. 
Of course, their London was a more picturesque 



56 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 






and a smaller place, bounded, roughly, by the 
Strand on the west and Aldgate on the east ; by 
Southwark on the south, and Clerkenwell, Fins- 
bury, Shoreditch, towards the north ; and those 
who lived in that small, comfortable city were as 
intimate with it almost as a man is with his native 
village, hence a playwright laid his scenes in its 
streets and inns, made casual reference by name 
to certain of its eccentric street-characters, to its 
highways and byways, and even its back alleys, in 
the surety that most of his audience knew those 
characters and the special characteristics of those 
streets and alleys as well as he did himself and would 
readily take the significance of his allusions. Middle- 
ton laid the principal scenes of A Chaste Maid in 
Cheapside in a goldsmith's shop on that thorough- 
fare, and between Yellowhammer, the goldsmith, 
engaged in his shop, and Maudlin, his wife, and 
Moll, his daughter, busied about the house, you 
have vivid little sketches of the commercial and 
domestic life of the period running through the 
rather extravagant plot of his comedy. As an illus- 
tration of the freedom with which dramatists then 
would use a living contemporary : Sims, a porter, 
comes into the shop with " a letter from a gentle- 
man in Cambridge," and Yellowhammer exclaims, 
" O, one of Hobson's porters : thou art welcome. 
— I told thee, Maud, we should hear from Tim." 
Tim, their son, was at Cambridge, as imaginary a 
person as Yellowhammer himself ; but Hobson 
was the real Cambridge carrier of those days. He 
trafficked between Cambridge and London, and was 
as well known in the one city as the other. Plutus, 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 57 

in Randolph's Hey, for Honesty, reciting his pedigree 
says, " I am Plutus, the rich god of wealth : my 
father was Pinchbeck Truepenny, the rich usurer 
of Islington ; my mother, Mistress Silverside, an 
alderman's widow. I was born in Golden Lane, 
christened at the Mint in the Tower ; Banks the 
conjuror and old Hobson the carrier were my god- 
fathers." Hobson was something of an eccentric ; 
he would let horses out on hire, but instead of per- 
mitting his customers to choose the one each pre- 
ferred, he insisted on the horses going out in rotation, 
and so has become immortalised in the proverb 
** Hobson's choice." More than that when this 
most glorious of carriers died a generation later no 
less a poet than Milton, then a young man at Cam- 
bridge, wrote two epitaphs, On the University Carrier, 
Who sickened in the time of his vacancy ; being forbid 
to go to London, by reason of the Plague : 

Here lies old Hobson ; death hath broke his girt, 
And here, alas ! hath laid him in the dirt. . . . 
'Twas such a shifter that, if truth were known, 
Death was half glad when he had got him down ; 
For he had, any time this ten years full, 
Dodged with him betwixt Cambridge and The Bull. . . . 
Rest, that gives all men life, gave him his death, 
And too much breathing put him out of breath. 

Which is curiously reminiscent of that later Cheap- 
side poet, Thomas Hood : he was born in the 
Poultry, and Milton in Bread Street, where a bust 
and an inscription commemorate his birthplace. 
And whilst we are touching on this aspect of Cheap- 
side, one may add that Herrick was born above his 
father's shop there ; that Keats lodged for a while 



58 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

in rooms over Bird-in-Hand Court, and Coryat, the 
odd author of the Crudities, used to live in Bow 
Lane. 

We are not yet finished, though, with the familiar 
way in which this real thoroughfare runs through 
the fictions of dramatists and novelists. Susan, the 
lady love of Ralph, in Beaumont and Fletcher's 
Knight of the Burning Pestle, was " a cooler's maid 
in Milk Street." Young Chartley, in Hey wood's 
Wise Woman of Hogsdon (now corrupted into 
Hoxton), remarks on the " brave things to be bought 
in the city ; Cheapside and the Exchange afford 
variety and rarity ; " and presently his father, old 
Chartley, newly arrived in London, ejaculates, 

Good Heaven ! this London is a stranger grown, 
And out of my acquaintance ; this seven years 
I have not seen Paul's steeple, or Cheap Cross. 

The steeple, of course, went down in the Great Fire, 
and Wren rebuilt the Cathedral with a dome ; and 
as for the Cross, which stood midway along Cheap- 
side to mark where Queen Elinor's coffin had rested 
on its way to burial at Westminster, the Puritans 
objected to the figure of the Virgin that was sculp- 
tured on it and it was removed in 1643. " Let your 
gifts be slight and dainty, rather than precious," 
urges Truewit, of Ben Jonson's Silent Woman. " Let 
cunning be above cost. Give cherries at time 
of year, or apricots ; and say they were sent 
you out of the country, though you bought them 
in Cheapside ; " and Littlewit, admiring his wife's 
new dress, in Bartholomew Fair, challenges " all 
Cheapside to show such another." "Men and 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 59 

women are born," cries Justiniano, in Webster's 
Westward Ho ! " and come running into the world 
faster than coaches do into Cheapside upon Simon's 
or Jude's day." 

But one might go on in this fashion almost end- 
lessly, and you could gather from these old plays a 
full and intimate acquaintance with the peculiar 
characteristics of Cheapside and the life that went 
on in it then. There is talk enough in them of the 
Mermaid alone to fill a chapter. It stood between 
Friday and Bread Streets, with side entrances in each. 
Ben Jonson, in the poem on his celebrated voyage 
through the London sewer, sings of " the brave 
adventure of two wights," who 

At Bread Street's Mermaid having dined, and merry, 
Proposed to go to Holborn in a wherry ; 

and he shows you Meercraft, in The Devil is an Ass, 
reproving the impoverished Everill with, 

Why, I have told you this. This comes of wearing 
Scarlet, gold lace, and cut-works ! your fine gartering, 
With your blown roses, cousin ! and your eating 
Pheasant, and godwit, here in London, haunting 
The Globes and Mermaids, wedging in with lords 
Still at the table. . . . 

There is a London street scene in Beaumont and 
Fletcher's Wit Without Money, where Valentine 
meets Francisco and Lance : they try to borrow a 
hundred pounds from him, but he is too broken 
himself to lend them more than five shillings, and 
to their plea as to how they are to get money, he 
airily advises them to take to writing news, or better 
still: 



60 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Cosmography 
Thou'rt deeply read in ; draw me a map from the Mermaid, 
I mean a midnight map. to 'scape the watches, 
And such long, senseless examinations, 
And gentlemen shall feed thee, right good gentlemen. 

Cheapside has rung with the midnight noises of such 
roistering gentlemen, coming late from the vanished 
tavern in no good state to find their way home, and 
anxious to go by quiet ways where there was no 
danger of running into any officious Dogberrys. 
Valentine ends the interview and gets rid of his 
importunate friends with a hasty, parting invitation : 

Meet me at the Mermaid, 
And thou shalt see what things 

Which has a pleasant echo in it of Beaumont's rap- 
turous and famous letter from the country to Ben 
Jonson — 

What things have we seen 
Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have been 
So nimble and so full of subtile flame 
As if that every one from whence they came 
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
Of his dull life. . . . 

Up King Street is the Guildhall, which plays a 
part in so many plays from Shakespeare's time to 
Tennyson's ; but before we come to King Street, there 
is Bow Church, whose bells rang in the ears of Dick 
Whittington, out on Highgate Hill, and called him 
back to be thrice Lord Mayor of London. 

I'll get a high-crowned hat with five low bells 
To make a peal shall serve as well as Bow, 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 61 

says Microprepes, in Randolph's Muses' Looking- 
Glass, when, as churchwarden of his parish he is 
arranging to put a steeple on their church ; and 
that faithful cockney of yesterday, Henry S. Leigh, 
shows how remembering the sound of Bow Bells 
when he is far from them will make the true-born 
Londoner home-sick : 

I am partial to trees as a rule ; 

And the rose is a beautiful flower. 
(Yes, I once read a ballad at school 

Of a rose that was washed in a shower.) 
But although I may dote on the rose, 

I can scarcely believe that it smells 
Quite so sweet in the bed where it grows 

As when sold within sound of Bow Bells. 

If the unimagined history of the city were not 
rather outside our scope, how much we should have 
to say of stirring episodes in the life of London 
that have happened in and around Bow Church ; 
of offenders who have been burned and hanged 
in the open street hereabouts ; of the stately pro- 
cessions of Kings, Queens, and especially of Lord 
Mayors that have glittered up Cheapside and round 
to the Guildhall ! But to-day we will go up King 
Street with that small boy in Dickens's delightful 
short story, Gone Astray. He was a small boy who 
had evaded his nurse and was bent, among other 
things, on rinding his way to Guildhall and seeing 
Gog and Magog : 

" I found it a long journey to the Giants and a slow one. 
I came into the presence at last, and gazed up at them with 
dread and veneration. They looked better-tempered and were 
altogether more shiny-faced than I had expected ; but they 



62 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

were very big and, as I judged their pedestals to be about 
forty feet high, I considered that they would be very big indeed 
if they were walking on the stone pavement. I was in a state 
of mind as to these and all such figures which I suppose holds 
equally with most children. While I knew them to be images 
made of something that was not flesh and blood, I still invested 
them with attributes of life — with consciousness of my being 
there, for example, and the power of keeping a sly eye upon 
me. Being very tired I got into the corner under Magog, to 
be out of the way of his eye, and fell asleep. When I started 
up after a long nap, I thought the Giants were roaring, but it 
was only the City." 

He goes on to relate how, feeling very hungry, he 
went out and. bought a roll and a German sausage, 
and took them back and ate them in the Guildhall, 
a friendly stray dog who had followed him fawning 
round and begging for the scraps. Then after cry- 
ing a little from very loneliness, he set forth and made 
his way to Cheapside again, and so on to the Royal 
Exchange. I am not going to describe Guildhall : 
you may go and see it, with the Giants in it still. 
But we have other things to detain us yet in Cheap- 
side. Here, for one, is Bucklersbury — the very name 
redolent of half a dozen bits in the Elizabethan 
dramas, though the lane is no longer given over, 
as it was in Shakespeare's time, to grocers and 
druggists whose simples and spices made it a place 
of mingled fragrances, especially in the Spring of 
the year. " Go into Bucklersbury," Mistress Tenter- 
hook orders her cashier in Westward Ho ! " and 
fetch me two ounces of preserved melons : look 
there be no tobacco taken in the shop when he weighs 
it ; " and in the same play you have Mistress Wafer 
hurriedly dispatching a boy — " Run into Bucklers- 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 63 

bury for two ounces of dragon-water, some sper- 
maceti, and treacle." And we are here again in 
Falstafr's footsteps, for you remember his lusty 
appeal to Mistress Ford : " What made me love 
thee ? let that persuade thee there's something 
extraordinary in thee. Come, I cannot cog and 
say thou art this and that, like a many of these 
lisping hawthorn buds, that come like women in 
men's apparel, and smell like Bucklersbury in 
simple-time ; I cannot ; but I love thee." 

There is no street out of Cheapside, however, that 
has such peculiar attractions for me as Old Jewry. 
Not because the Jews had a settlement here in 
the time of William the Conqueror; nor because 
Lord Beaconsfield was articled to a solicitor here 
in Frederick's Place ; nor because that mysterious 
person in Gissing's Town Traveller, the Lord Pol- 
perro, who masqueraded as Mr. Clover and kept a 
china shop, came to consult his solicitor, Cuthbertson, 
at Old Jewry Chambers, a gloomy, blind square of 
a place on the right of the street ; but because Ben 
Jonson laid in Old Jewry some of the chief scenes 
of his Every Man in His Humour. I first read 
Jonson when I was barely twenty, when my business 
affairs took me round by Old Jewry almost every 
day, and for me the street has ever since worn the 
atmosphere that he gives it in his play. 

Except for a house or two in Frederick's Place, 
and the back of a church, there is nothing in Old 
Jewry nowadays that can pretend to anything like 
antiquity ; it is as staid and ordinary a thorough- 
fare as you will find anywhere in London. But 
at the Cheapside end, on the right, is Dove Court, 



64 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

and I am persuaded that such a Court was there 
when Ben Jonson was writing ; it retains its original 
shape, and even in rebuilding it the builders have 
been unable to get rid of its quaint, snug character. 
We have lost the gift of building such queer, pic- 
turesque byways ; they belong to an age that was 
simpler, gave freer play to its idiosyncrasies, was 
less severely practical than ours ; but you cannot 
walk into Dove Court to-day, any more than you 
can walk into that odd Mitre Court in Wood Street, 
without feeling that you have strayed back into the 
Elizabethan era. And next door to Dove Court 
is a modern tavern, but nothing will ever persuade 
me it is not the lineal descendant of that Windmill 
Tavern which figures in Every Man in His Humour. 
You find it as the first scene of Act 3 : " The Old 
Jewry. A room in the Windmill Tavern ; " and 
into it come Master Mathew, the town gull, Well- 
bred, the half-brother of Squire Downright, and 
the inimitable Captain Bobadil, continuing a con- 
versation : 

Mat. Yes, faith, sir, we were at your lodging to seek you. 

Wei. Oh, I came not there to-night. 

Bob. Your brother delivered us as much. 

Wei. Who, my brother Downright ? 

Bob. He. Mr. Wellbred, I know not in what kind you hold 
me ; but let me say to you this : as sure as honour, I esteem 
it so much out of the sunshine of reputation, to throw the 
least beam of regard upon such a 

Wei. Sir, I must hear no ill words of my brother. 

Bob. I protest to you, as I have a thing to be saved about 
me, I never saw any gentleman-like part 

Wei. Well, good Captain, faces about to some other discourse. 
Bob. With your 1 eave, sir, an there were no more men living 




QjRADIS€ STR66T 
LAMB6TM ■ 
fredyidcoJc - 

Luke Ackroyd, of Gissings ' Thyrza,' lived in Paradise Street. Bowers shop, 
too, a small general shop, was in Paridise Street, close by the railway arch.' 

Chapter 8 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 65 

upon the face of the earth, I should not fancy him, by St. 
George ! 

Mat. Troth, nor I ; he is of a rustical cut, I know not how : 
he doth not carry himself like a gentleman of fashion. 

Wei. Oh, Master Mathew, that's a grace peculiar but to a 
few, quos cequus amavit Jupiter. 

Mat. I understand you, sir. 

Wei. No question, you do — or you do not, sir. 

At which juncture arrive Edward Knowell and 
Master Stephen ; Knowell incensed that Wellbred 
has sent him a compromising letter which the mes- 
senger delivered into the hands of his father, who 
opened it ; and presently they are joined in this 
same glorious tavern by Brainworm, the servant 
of Knowell senior : he comes disguised to warn 
Edward that his father is in pursuit of him and is 
now " at Justice Clement's house in Coleman Street, 
where he but stays my return." Wellbred lodges 
at the house of the merchant Kitely, also in Old 
Jewry, but had dated his letter to Edward Knowell 
from The Windmill, where another scene is placed 
later in the comedy. One scene, between the elder 
Knowell and Formal, the justice's clerk, takes place 
in the open street of Old Jewry ; and several scenes 
are laid in " The Old Jewry. A Hall in Kitely's 
house," in the first of which you see something of 
the merchant's business. Downright has just called, 
but before settling to talk with him, Kitely finishes 
giving instructions to his clerk, Cash : 

Kit. Thomas, come hither. 
There lies a note within upon my desk ; 
Here, take my key : it is no matter neither. — 
Where's the boy ? 



66 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Cash. Within, sir, in the warehouse. 

Kit. Let him tell over straight that Spanish gold, 
And weigh it, with the pieces of eight. Do you 
See the delivery of those silver stuffs 
To Master Lucar : tell him, if he will, 
He shall have the grograns at the rate I told him, 
And I will meet him on the Exchange anon. 

After Cash is gone, he explains to Downright that 
he is an excellent clerk ; years ago he had been left a 
foundling at his door, and he had been at the charge 
of breeding him up. From which they pass to talk 
of Downright 's half-brother Wellbred and how he 
has fallen into evil and ruinously extravagant habits, 
till they are interrupted by the bell ringing for break- 
fast, which intimates that our citizens began their 
day's work several hours earlier than they do in this 
century. 

Everything in the play happens in Old Jewry and 
within a mile or so north of it. You have scenes 
in " Coleman Street. A room in Justice Clement's 
house." Well, Coleman Street is a continuation of 
Old Jewry, separated from it by Gresham Street ; 
and you have scenes in Moorfields, the locality of which 
may be traced by the street of that name which is a 
continuation of Coleman Street, separated from it only 
by Fore Street ; and Moorfields used to stretch away 
across the City Road to Hoxton (otherwise Hogsden), 
where old Knowell had his residence, and you have a 
scene in his house, whence Edward and Stephen set 
forth to that meeting at The Windmill. Somewhere 
on the city side of Moorfields was a lane leading to 
the shabby home of Cob, the water-carrier, in one of 
whose rooms the boastful Captain Bobadil has his 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 67 

lodging, " very neat and private." There is a scene 
in the lane when the prying Master Mathew noses 
out the lodging that Bobadil keeps secret and is 
amazed that a man of his pretensions should " lie at 
a water-bearer's house ! a gentleman of his havings ! " 
and a greater scene inside the house when Master 
Mathew intrudes upon the privacy of the Captain, 
who carries off his humiliation with a grand air. 
Cob, commenting on the situation after the visitor 
has gone upstairs, observes, " You should have some 
now would take this Master Mathew to be a gentle- 
man, at the least. His father's an honest man, a 
worshipful fishmonger, and so forth ; and now does 
he creep and wriggle into acquaintance with all the 
brave gallants about the town, such as my guest is 
(O, my guest is a fine man !), and they flout him in- 
vincibly. He useth every day to a merchant's house 
where I serve water, one Master Kitely, in the Old 
Jewry ; and here's the jest, he is in love with my 
master's sister, Mrs. Bridget, and calls her mistress ; 
and there he will sit you a whole afternoon sometimes, 
reading of these same abominable, vile, rascally verses, 
poetrie, poetrie, and speaking of interludes ; 'twill 
make a man burst to hear him. And the wenches, 
they do so jeer and ti-he at him ! " 

So, here comes Cob every morning into the city, 
along Coleman Street, past Justice Clement's house, 
bringing the day's water-supply to Master Kitely 's 
house in the Old Jewry : he walks in at that scene 
from which I have quoted and arriving just after the 
breakfast bell has rung is reproved by Kitely for 
u coming so late this morning." How it brings the 
everyday life of the time back to you ; the merchant's 



68 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

business going on all the while from soon after day- 
break, and the love-sick Master Mathew making his 
call in the afternoons to sit in one of the rooms over 
the warehouse and read poetry to Mistress Bridget 
and be laughed at by the -maids. This is the real life 
of Old Jewry, for it never dies ; I know all these people 
better than I know the living strangers passing to 
and fro in the street, and here, near by Old Jewry 
Chambers, where Gissing's lawyer, Cuthbertson, had 
his office, Kitely's house used to stand, on the site 
that is now taken up by a huge, handsome modern 
building. I feel that this is where it stood, and who 
shall confute me ? Once, when I was early in the 
city, I even went out of my way to walk along Old 
Jewry before seven in the morning, so that I might 
be passing at the hour when Cob came toiling across 
from Coleman Street with his water-supply. 

Cheapside was always a notable shopping centre ; 
latterly it caters mainly for masculine needs, but 
aforetime the ladies came shopping here as now they 
go to Regent Street. It was quieter, then, of course ; 
there was far less traffic in the roads and on the foot- 
ways ; otherwise it would not have been considered 
a convenient place for public executions. Stow tells 
us of many such ; among others he says that in 135 1 
" two fishmongers were beheaded at the standard in 
Chepe, but I read not of their offence ; 1381, Wat 
Tyler beheaded Richard Lions and other there. In 
the year 1339, Henry IV. caused the blanck charters 
made by Richard II. to be burnt there. In the year 
1450 Jack Cade, captain of the Kentish rebels, be- 
headed the Lord Say there. In the year 1461, John 
Davy had his hand stricken off there, because he had 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSTDE 69 

stricken a man before the judges at Westminster.' ' 
Pepys was a frequenter of Cheapside and records that 
a little gibbet was set up in the middle of the street 
with a picture of Hewson, the regicide, hung upon it, 
Hewson himself having safely escaped to Amsterdam 
on the Restoration ; and he relates how, in 1664, 
" some 'prentices being put in the pillory to-day for 
beating of their masters or such like thing, in Cheap- 
side, a company of 'prentices come and rescued them 
and pulled down the pillory ; and they being set up 
again, did the like again." It mitigates the present 
commercial severity of the place to recall these things, 
but they do not properly concern us, and we will 
return to our imaginary folk. 

We have reached that part of Cheapside which has a 
place in Barnaby Rudge, where you read of the troops 
being called out and coming into conflict with the 
mob : " The firing began in the Poultry, where the 
chain was drawn across the road, where nearly a score 
of people were killed on the first discharge. Their 
bodies having been hastily carried into St. Mildred's 
church by the soldiers, they fired again, and following 
fast upon the crowd, who began to give way when 
they saw the execution that was done, formed across 
Cheapside, and charged them at the point of the 
bayonet." 

The riots and the soldiers were real, you may say, 
but Mr. Haredale, who belongs to the same novel, 
was not, and a little before this happened in the 
Poultry he had come riding in from the other side of 
the riotous city : he had captured Barnaby's father 
and was bringing him with him, bent on handing him 
over to justice and charging him with the murder 



70 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

he had committed eight-and-twenty years earlier. 
He was warned on the road that he would find it 
difficult in the disturbed state of the city to induce 
any magistrate to commit his prisoner to jail on such 
a complaint. 

" But notwithstanding these discouraging accounts, they 
went on and reached the Mansion House soon after sunrise. 
Mr. Haredale threw himself from his horse, but he had no need 
to knock at the door, for it was already open, and there stood 
upon the step a portly old man with a very red, or rather 
purple face, who, with an anxious expression of countenance, 
was remonstrating with some unseen person upstairs, while 
the porter essayed to close the door by degrees and get rid of 
him. With the intense impatience and excitement natural 
to one in his condition, Mr. Haredale thrust himself forward 
and was about to speak, when the fat old gentleman interposed : 

" ' My good sir,' said he, ' pray let me get an answer. This is 
the sixth time I have been here. I was here five times yesterday. 
My house is threatened with destruction. It is to be burned 
down tonight, and was to have been last night, but they had 
other business on their hands. Pray let me get an answer.' " 

The old gentleman was a vintner from Holborn 
Hill, and as the Lord Mayor, trembling within, was 
too terrified of the Gordon rioters to do anything 
either for him or Mr. Haredale, they rode off together 
and appealed more successfully to Sir John Fielding, 
the doughty, blind magistrate of Bow Street. 

And Cheapside has its fair share of homelier fictitious 
happenings, such as this in Beaconsfield's Tancred, 
when Tancred is driving on his first visit into the 
city : 

" It was just where the street is most crowded, where it 
narrows, and losing the name of Cheapside, takes that of the 
Poultry, that the last of a series of stoppages occurred ; a 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 71 

stoppage which, at the end of ten minutes, lost its inert character 
of mere obstruction, and developed into the livelier qualities 
of the row. There were oaths, contradictions, menaces : 
' No, you shan't ; Yes, I will ; No, I didn't ; Yes, you did ; 
No, you haven't ; Yes, you have ; ' the lashing of a whip, 
the interference of a policeman, a crash, a scream. Tancred 
looked out of the window of his brougham. He saw a chariot 
in distress, a chariot such as would have become an Ondine 
by the waters of the Serpentine, and the very last sort of 
equipage that you could expect to see smashed in the Poultry. 
It was really breaking a butterfly upon a wheel ; to crush 
its delicate springs, and crack its dark brown panels, soil its 
dainty hammer-cloth, and endanger the lives of its young 
coachman in a flaxen wig, and its two tall footmen in short 
coats, worthy of Cinderella. The scream, too, came from a 
fair owner, who was surrounded by clamorous carmen and 
city marshals, and who, in an unknown land, was afraid she 
might be put in a city Compter, because the people in the city 
had destroyed her beautiful chariot. Tancred let himself 
out of his brougham, and not without difficulty contrived, 
through the narrow and crowded passage formed by the two 
lines, to reach the chariot, which was coming the contrary 
way to him. Some ruthless officials were persuading a beautiful 
woman to leave her carriage, the wheel of which was broken. . . . 

" ' What am I to do ! ' exclaimed the lady, with a tearful 
eye and agitated face. 

" ' I have a carriage at hand/ said Tancred, who at this 
moment reached her, ' and it is quite at your service.' 

" The lady cast her beautiful eyes, with an expression of 
astonishment she could not conceal, at the distinguished youth 
who thus suddenly appeared in the midst of insolent carmen, 
brutal policemen, and all the cynical amateurs of a mob. 
Public opinion in the Poultry was against her ; her coachman's 
wig had excited derision ; the footmen had given themselves 
airs ; there was a strong feeling against the shortcoats. As for 
the lady, though at first awed by her beauty and magnificence, 
they rebelled against the authority of her manner. Besides, 
she was not alone. There was a gentleman with her, who wore 



72 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

moustaches, and had taken a part in the proceedings at first 
by addressing the carmen in French. 

" ' You are too good/ said the lady, with a sweet expression. 

" Tancred opened the door of the chariot, the policemen 
pulled down the steps, the servants were told to do the best 
they could with the wrecked equipage ; in a second, the lady 
and her companion were in Tancred's brougham, who, desiring 
his servants to obey all their orders, disappeared, for the 
stoppage at this moment began to move, and there was no time 
for bandying compliments. 

" He had gained the pavement, and had made his way as far 
as the Mansion House, when, finding a group of public buildings, 
he thought it prudent to enquire which was the Bank." 

It was pointed out to him, and near it he came to 
Sequins Court, in which were the offices of the great 
financier, Sidonia, whom he was on his way to see. 

John Calvert Burley, Besant's heir to many millions, 
in Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, was last seen here- 
abouts before his complete and mysterious vanishing. 
An old schoolfellow wrote to those who were seeking 
him " that he had met John Calvert Burley, looking 
prosperous, in or about the year 1870, in Cheapside ; 
that he addressed him by name, shook hands with him, 
and made an appointment to meet him again, which 
the latter never kept." But this is a common enough 
mystery in London : always you are hearing of some 
man who was met one day in a city crowd, and then 
disappeared as by magic and from that day forth 
could never be heard of any more. Not so common 
is that mystery of the elegant, fascinating Mr. 
Altamont, which belongs to this Mansion House end 
of Cheapside. The story is told by Thackeray's Mr. 
Yellowplush. In his youth he was Altamont's 
".tiger," but was ignorant of his master's occupation. 



THE POETRY OF CHEAPSIDE 73 

Altamont " had some business in the city, for he went 
in every morning at ten, got out of his tilbry at the 
City Road, and had it waiting for him at six ; when, 
if it was summer, he spanked round into the Park, 
and drove one of the neatest turnouts there." Never- 
theless, he lodged shabbily with a Mr. and Mrs. Shum 
out at Islington, and the youthful Yellowplush " slep 
over the way, and only came in with his boots and 
brexfast of a morning.' ' Altamont married his land- 
lady's daughter, and they lived in " a genteel house 
in Islington ; " he always had plenty of money, but 
would not tell either his wife or her family anything 
of his trade or profession. One day, when Altamont 
had been drinking unwisely, he let slip a remark that 
roused his wife's suspicions ; and, after going round to 
consult with her mother, she drove next morning to 
the city and reconnoitred the neighbourhood of the 
Bank of England. " She walked before the Bank, 
and behind the Bank : she came home disperryted, 
having learned nothink." Then her mother took up 
the pursuit, and, heavily veiled, went day after day 
on Altamont 's track, and at length returned in 
triumph, and called on her daughter to announce : 
" Now, my love, I have found him. Come with me 
tomorrow, and you shall know all ! " Mr. Yellowplush 
shall relate the sequel : 

" The ladies nex morning set out for the City, and I walked 
behind, doing the genteel thing, with a nosegy and a goold stick. 
We walked down the New Road — we walked down the City 
Road — we walked to the Bank. We were crossing from that 
heddyfiz to the other side of Cornhill, when all of a sudden 
missis shreeked, and fainted spontaceously away. I rushed 
forrard, and raised her in my arms, spiling thereby a new 



74 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

weskit and a pair of crimson smalcloes. I rushed forrard, I 
say, very nearly knocking down the old sweeper who was 
hobbling away as fast as posibl. We took her to Birch's ; 
we provided her with a hackney coach and every lucksury, 
and carried her home to Islington." 

In a word — as Mr. Yellowplush shudders to relate, 
after he has explained how, some days later, a recon- 
ciliation came about — " Mr. Haltamont swep the cross- 
ing from the Bank to Cornhill ! " And if you have 
any doubts as to the truth of the story, walk a few 
doors up Cornhill and here to this day is Birch's — a 
unique little confectionery shop, with a low, small- 
paned window — one of the very few relics that 
Cornhill still retains of an age that is gone. 



CHAPTER IV 

UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 

COMING from the foot of Holborn along Newgate 
Street and Cheapside I have a pleasant feeling 
that we are walking over ground that Dickens has 
trodden many times before us. There is a Sketch by 
Boz in which he writes, " We had been lounging one 
evening down Oxford Street, Holborn, Cheapside, 
Finsbury Square, and so on," and somewhere off the 
City Road he dropped into " a modest public-house 
of the old school, with a little old bar, and a little 
old landlord," and he describes the company he found 
there in " The Parlour Orator." He tramped along 
the City Road as far as Pentonville ; and before we 
continue on the main route I have mapped out for us, 
I want to branch off here, at the end of the Poultry, 
and make that same excursion that Dickens made. 
There are several points of interest to be noted by the 
way, but the chief end of our digression is to be that 
house mid-way up the City Road where Mr. Micawber 
lived, when David Copperfield was lodging with him. 

Except for the Bank of England, which occupies 
all the eastern side of it, Prince's Street has been newly 
built and has no memories ; but the first turning on 
the right, round by the back of the Bank, is Lothbury 
— so called, according to Stow, because it was, in his 
sixteenth century, the work-place of many copper 

75 



76 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

founders who, in the turning and polishing of their 
metal, made a noise that was peculiarly loathsome to 
the passer-by. A few paces up Lothbury is Token- 
house Yard, which we must not leave unvisited. 
When Defoe's rascally young Colonel Jack had stolen 
a purse from an old gentleman near St. Swithin's 
Lane, just beyond the Mansion House, he " went 
directly forward into the broad place on the north 
side of the Exchange, then scoured down Bartholomew 
Lane, so into Tokenhouse Yard, into the alleys that 
pass through thence to London Wall, so through 
Moorgate, and sat down on the grass in the second 
of the quarters of Moorfields, towards the middle 
field." Here he waited till his associate, Will, joined 
him, and they found a rich paper of loose diamonds 
in the purse. Bartholomew Lane flanks the other 
side of the Bank, parallel with Prince's Street, and will 
bring you to the Exchange, and St. Swithin's Lane, 
whence Colonel Jack had come. Tokenhouse Yard is 
also the scene of a dreadful little picture in Defoe's 
Journal of the Plague : 

" Passing through Tokenhouse Yard, in Lothbury, of a 
sudden a casement violently opened just over my head, 
and a woman gave three frightful schreeces, and then cried, 
' Oh ! death, death, death ! ' in a most inimitable tone, and 
which struck me with horror and a dullness in my very blood. 
There was nobody to be seen in the whole street, neither did 
any other window open, for people had no curiosity now in 
any case, nor could anybody help one another ; so I went on 
to pass into Bell Alley." 

The Tokenhouse Yard that the Plague reduced to 
such a state of desolation and helpless despair went 
down in the Great Fire, and most of it has been re- 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 77 

built more than once since then ; its importance 
centres to-day in its famous Auction Mart ; but it 
still wears an old-world air and has subtle touches of 
age about it. A tunnel through the house at the inner 
end brings you into what used to be Bell Alley, where 
Defoe witnessed another harrowing incident of the 
Plague ; and the narrow Alley takes you to Moor- 
gate Street and, continuing across the road, runs into 
Coleman Street. Mr. Pickwick, you know, whilst he 
was staying at the George and Vulture, in George 
Yard, Lombard Street, was arrested for debt by a 
gentleman who presented a card inscribed : " Namby, 
Bell Alley, Coleman Street/' He and his assistant, 
Smouch, carried Mr. Pickwick off in a coach to Coleman 
Street, and " the coach having turned into a very 
narrow and dark street, stopped before a house with 
iron bars to all the windows ; the door-posts of which 
were graced by the name and title of ' Namby, Officer 
to the Sheriffs of London ; ' the inner gate having been 
opened by a gentleman who might have been a neglected 
twin-brother of Mr. Smouch, and who was endowed 
with a large key for the purpose, Mr. Pickwick was 
shown into the ' coffee-room.' " When I first knew 
the Alley, there was a house on the south side, near the 
Coleman Street end, that had bars across its windows, 
and I accepted it unhesitatingly as Namby's ; but 
nothing remains of it now ; all that side of the Alley 
is taken up by the blind side walls of monster buildings 
that have their doors in Moorgate and in Coleman 
Streets. 

In the days of the Commonwealth Coleman Street 
was a hotbed of Puritanism ; Cowley used it as 
a background for his comedy, " Cutter of Coleman 



78 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Street ; " but it had acquired that reputation much 
earlier : when James I. was King, and when Ben 
Jonson's Justice Clement had his house in the Street, 
for you find Mistress Chremylus, in Randolph's Hey 
for Honesty, protesting : " I'll be sworn the lay 
clergy, while they were a-preaching at Bell Alley and 
Coleman Street, I came by with my basket : the 
hungry rascals in pure zeal had like to eat up my 
gingerbread, had there not been Popish pictures upon 
it. I had much ado to keep them from scrambling 
my apples too, had not the sets of my old ruff looked 
like so many organ pipes and frightened them ! " 
If you have read Trollope's Prime Minister you may 
remember that in Coleman Street were the offices of 
that notable Mining Company in which the cunning 
Lopez was so deeply interested, and the Street is 
largely made up of such-like offices to this day. 

London Wall cuts off the northern end of Coleman 
Street ; up London Wall to the left is the church 
of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, where Milton, and Chap- 
man, the Elizabethan dramatist, are buried ; a 
portion of the old Roman city wall is still standing 
in the churchyard. But go to the end of Coleman 
Street, and across Fore Street is Moorfields, to which 
we have already made some reference, and Moor- 
fields takes you to Ropemaker Street, which was 
Ropemaker Alley when Defoe died in it. Here 
we are beyond the city wall, and hereabouts were 
those Moorfields that Colonel Jack frequented, and 
where Bobadil lived. Turn off to the right through 
Ropemaker Street and we are out on Finsbury Pave- 
ment, with Moorgate Street and the site of the old 
gateway in London Wall well behind us. But see 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 79 

how difficult it is to make progress through a dis- 
trict so crowded with memories ! The very next 
turning is Chiswell Street, and glancing along it 
you may see the corner of Bunhill Row, where Milton 
lived when he was writing " Paradise Lost ; " where 
Dry den visited him ; and where he died. 

We will not go round that way, though, for Bun- 
hill Row has been drearily altered, and would bring 
us back into the City Road through a neighbour- 
hood that, as a citizen of London and a normal 
human creature, I can never traverse without being 
depressed by a sense of bewilderment and unspeak- 
able shame. There are long streets between the 
Row and the City Road, a wide area of them, whence 
we have cleared away a squalid lot of little old houses 
and put up in their place mass after mass of gaunt 
and gloomy Workmen's Dwellings. There are whole 
streets full of these inhuman rookeries, these sanitary 
piggeries, and that a Christian people could have 
built such godless and debasing piles believing them 
fit for men and women to inhabit, for children to be 
born in and, with such an environment, reared to 
live decent and blameless lives, passes my com- 
prehension. It passes my understanding, too, that 
any mortal man having a pleasant residence for 
himself, his wife and little ones, could in any way 
sanction the building of such grossly unsanctified 
barracks and think them good homes for other human 
souls, though he knows that in no circumstances 
would he consider them good enough for himself. 
Cheerless, hideous, gigantic structures they are, 
that even age and dirt, that make most other things 
picturesque, can only make more hideous and more 



80 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

repellent. Each is squared about an asphalted 
courtyard that is too deeply shut-in for the sun to 
reach down to it, and in these barren squares you 
shall see swarms of little children playing, spindly, 
ragged little things, for the most part, bleached for 
want of the sun, thin and bloodless from insufficient 
feeding, and yet we thrill with pride when we tell * 
each other that rich and poor in this favoured country 
are amenable to the same law, as if that were the 
very height of justice ; whereas, if you reflect upon 
it, nothing could be more crudely and unintelli- 
gently unjust. There ought to be one law for the 
rich and another for the poor, and the law for the 
rich should be far the more stringent of the two. 
What right have we to expect the lives that are 
brought to maturity in those swarming, villainously 
ugly Workmen's Dwellings to be as honest, as cleanly, 
as moral as the lives that are nurtured in stately 
and beautiful country mansions or healthful houses 
of the suburbs ? Certainly, if only of him to whom 
much is given shall much be required, we are not 
entitled to expect anything whatever of the poverty- 
smitten multitude that live in the dreary, desolate 
waste of Workmen's Dwellings that is shamefully 
hidden away behind the western side of the City 
Road. 

By-and-by, we shall have to see more of such 
soul-blighting places as these, because some of 
Gissing's imaginary people happened to live in one 
of them ; but for the moment we will keep out along 
the City Road and say no more of the deformities 
in its byways. 

If this were a book about real people we should 







g WalmutTz.££ Walk- 

"All Lambeth is thick with memories of Thyrza. Lydia and Thyrza lodged there in 
Walnut Tree Walk." 

Chapter 8 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 81 

have to go into Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, 
where Defoe is buried, and Bunyan, Blake, 
Richard Cromwell, Strudwick, the Snow Hill grocer 
in whose house Bunyan died, Wesley's mother, and 
many another whose memory still haunts these 
London streets. And facing Bunhill Fields is 
Wesley's Chapel, in the graveyard of which Wesley 
has his last resting place. But we are getting too 
entangled in realities, and have no proper business 
with anything until we come to the corner of Old 
Street, which opens left and right of us. To the 
right is that Hoxton (then Hogsden) where Ben 
Jonson's Master Knowell and his son lived ; all 
about there was Hoxton Fields, to which there are 
so many references in Every Man in His Humour, 
and once in Hoxton Fields Ben Jonson fought a 
duel with Gabriel Spencer, the player, and killed 
him. Curtain Road is along there, commemorating 
the old Curtain Theatre with which Shakespeare 
was associated when he first came to London, and 
at the far end of Old Street is Shoreditch church, 
in whose churchyard lie some of the Curtain's famous 
actors, men who were friends of Shakespeare. And 
that same end of the street, which has Shoreditch 
station at one of its corners, has associations with 
Gissing's Nether World. If you go down there you 
will find two or three Italian pastrycooks' shops, 
any one of which may be the one in which Bob 
Hewett had a memorable conversation with Clem 
Peckover, of whom we shall see more in a later 
chapter. Clem had married the prodigal Joseph 
Snowden, and was anxious that Bob's wife, Pene- 
lope, otherwise Pennyloaf, should be on good terms 
6 



82 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

again with her husband's daughter by his first wife, 
because Jane Snowden was living with Joseph's 
father, at Hanover Street, Islington, and the old 
man was believed to have money. 

"In Old Street, not far from Shoreditch Station, was a shabby 
little place of refreshment, kept by an Italian ; pastry and 
sweet-stuff filled the window ; at the back of the shop, through 
a doorway on each side of which was looped a pink curtain, 
a room, furnished with three marble-topped tables, invited 
those who wished to eat and drink more at ease than was 
possible before the counter. Except on Sunday evening this 
room was very little used, and there, on the occasion of which 
I speak, Clem was sitting with Bob Hewett. They had been 
having supper together — French pastry and a cup of cocoa. 

" She leaned forward on her elbows, and said imperatively, 
* Tell Penny loaf to make it up with her again.' 

" ' Why ? • 

" ' Because I want to know what goes on in Hanover Street. 
You was a fool to send her away, and you'd ought to have 
told me about it before now. If they was such friends, I suppose 
the girl told her lots o' things. But I expect they see each 
other just the same. You don't suppose she does all you tell 
her ? ' 

" ' I'll bet you what you like she does ! ' cried Bob. 

" Clem glared at him. 

" ' Oh, you an' your Penny loaf ! Likely she tells you the 
truth. You're so fond of each other, ain't you ! Tells you 
everything, does she ? — the way you treat her ! ' 

" ' Who's always at me to treat her worse still ? ' Bob 
retorted half angrily, half in expostulation. 

" ' Well, and so I am, 'cause I hate the name of her ! I'd 
like to hear as you starve her and her brats half to death. 
How much money did you give her last week ? Now just 
you tell me the truth. How much was it ? ' 

" ' How can I remember ? Three or four bob, I s'pose.' 

" ■ Three or four bob ! ' she repeated, snarling. ' Give her 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 83 

one, and make her live all the week on it. Wear her down ! 
Make her pawn all she has, and go cold ! ' 

" Her cheeks were on fire ; her eyes started in the fury of 
jealousy ; she set her teeth together. 

" ' I'd better do for her altogether/ Bob said, with an evil 
grin. 

" Clem looked at him, without speaking ; kept her gaze 
on him ; then said in a thick voice : 

" ' There's many a true word spoke in joke.' 

" Bob moved uncomfortably. There was a brief silence, 
then the other, putting her face nearer his : 

" ' Not just yet. I want to use her to get all I can about 
that girl and her old beast of a grandfather.' . . . 

" There came nosies from the shop. Three work-girls had 
just entered and were buying cakes, which they began to eat 
at the counter. They were loud in gossip and laughter, and 
their voices rang like brass against brass. . . . 

11 ' What do you expect to know from that girl ? ' inquired 
Bob. 

" ' Lots o' things. I want to know what the old bloke's 
goin' to do with his money, don't I ? And I want to know 
what my beast of a 'usband's got out of him. And I want 
to know what that feller Kirkwood's goin' to do.' . . . 

" He shuffled with his feet, then rose. 

" ' Where can I see you on Wednesday morning ? ' asked 
Clem. ' I want to hear about that girl.' 

" ' It can't be Wednesday morning. I tell you I shall be 
getting the sack next thing ; they've promised it. Two days 
last week I wasn't at the shop, and one day this. It can't 
go on.' 

" His companion retorted angrily, and for five minutes they 
stood in embittered colloquy. It ended in Bob's turning away 
and going out into the street. Clem followed, and they walked 
westwards in silence. Reaching City Road, and crossing to 
the corner where lowers St. Luke's Hospital— grim abode of 
the insane, here in the midst of London's squalor and uproar — 
they halted to take leave. The last words they exchanged, 
after making an appointment, were of brutal violence." 



84 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

We are at the corner where Clem and Bob Hewett 
parted, by the asylum of St. Luke's. Another two 
minutes' walk up the City Road and we reach Shep- 
herdess Walk, with the Eagle Tavern at its corner, 
and adjoining it the Salvation Army premises that 
used to be the old Grecian Theatre. In its prime 
the Eagle was a great place of entertainment, a sort 
of Vauxhall Gardens on an inferior scale. It is 
immortalised in the nonsensical old catch : 
Up and down the City Road, 

In and out the Eagle, 
That's the way the money goes, 
Pop goes the weasel ! 

and in " Miss Evans and the Eagle," which, you may 
remember, in the Sketches by Boz. Miss Evans lived 
with her parents at Camden Town, and the little 
journeyman carpenter, Mr. Samuel Wilkins, who 
was deeply in love with her, called at the house 
" one Monday afternoon in his best attire, with 
his face more shining and his waistcoat more bright 
than either had ever appeared before. The family 
were just going to tea, and were so glad to see him." 
He had brought a pint of shrimps with him " to 
propitiate Mrs. Ivins," and sat down chatting affably 
while the two youngest Miss Ivinses made the kettle 
boil, Jemima being upstairs " cleaning herself " : 

" ' I vos a thinking/ said Mr. Samuel Wilkins, during a 
pause in the conversation — ' I vos a thinking of taking J'mima 
to the Eagle to-night.' — ' my ! ' exclaimed Mrs. Ivins. ' Lor ! 
how nice ! ' said the youngest Miss Ivins. ' Well, I declare ! ' 
added the youngest Miss Ivins but one. ' Tell J'mima to put 
on her white muslin, Tilly,' screamed Mrs. Ivins, with motherly 
anxiety ; and down came J'mima herself soon afterwards in 
a white muslin gown carefully hooked and eyed, and a little 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 85 

red shawl, plentifully pinned, and white straw bonnet trimmed 
with red ribbons, and a small necklace, and large pair of 
bracelets, and Denmark satin shoes, and open-worked stockings, 
white cotton gloves on her fingers, and a cambric pocket- 
handkerchief, carefully folded up, in her hand — all quite 
genteel and ladylike. And away went Miss J'mima Ivins 
and Mr. Samuel Wilkins, and a dress cane with a gilt knob at 
the top, to the admiration and envy of the street in general, 
and to the high gratification of Mrs. Ivins and the two youngest 
Miss Ivinses in particular. They had no sooner turned into 
the Pancras Road than who should Miss J'mima Ivins stumble 
upon by the most fortunate accident in the world but a young 
lady as she knew, with her young man ; and it is so strange 
how things do turn out sometimes — they were actually going 
to the Eagle too. So Mr. Samuel Wilkins was introduced to 
Miss J'mima Ivins's friend's young man, and they all walked 
on together, talking, and laughing, and joking away like any- 
thing ; and when they got as far as Pentonville, Miss Ivins's 
friend's young man would have the ladies go into the Crown 
to taste some shrub, which, after a great blushing and giggling, 
and hiding of faces in elaborate pocket-handkerchiefs, they 
consented to do. Having tasted it once, they were easily 
prevailed upon to taste it again ; and they sat out in the 
garden tasting shrub and looking at the busses alternately, 
till it was just the proper time to go to the Eagle ; and then 
they resumed their journey, and walked very fast, for fear 
they should lose the beginning of the concert in the Rotunda. 
' How ev'nly ! ' said Miss J'mima Ivins, and Miss J'mima Ivins's 
friend, both at once, when they passed the gate and were fairly 
inside the gardens. There were the walks beautifully gravelled 
and planted, and the refreshment boxes painted and orna- 
mented like so many snuff-boxes, and the variegated lamps 
shedding their rich light upon the company's heads, and the 
place for dancing ready chalked for the company's feet, and a 
Moorish band playing at one end of the gardens and an opposi- 
tion military band playing away at the other." 

Everything went well until a gentleman with 



86 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

large whiskers persisted in staring at Miss J'mima 
Ivins, and a gentleman in a plaid waistcoat flattered 
her friend with similar attentions. Well, the Eagle 
has gone and a new tavern has risen on its ashes, 
but here is the ground upon which Mr. Samuel Wilkins 
and Miss Ivins's friend's young man came out, very 
much damaged, after a furious affray with those 
two intrusive strangers, to carry their hysterical 
and remorseful ladies home in a hackney coach. 

Two or three minutes beyond Shepherdess Walk, 
and we are at Windsor Terrace. Now, the City 
Road is the shabbiest, the most carelessly untidy 
of all the great highways into London. The best 
of its shops are dully or garishly respectable ; the 
worst of them have a dusty, littered, hugger-mugger, 
neglected look that would disgrace a back alley in 
the East End. The northern part of the Road is 
made up of dingy, tired-looking private houses, 
with dingy, depressed gardens in front of them — 
houses that look as if they had once been rural and 
belonged to a country town, but had come to London 
and been so long in it that they have grown haggard, 
sophisticated, disheartened. At one point the road 
is patched together with a dowdy canal bridge, over 
whose parapets you see a dirty, sluggish canal, its 
banks strewn with piles of coal and high, unsightly 
stacks of timber. If there is any more grubby, 
slovenly, slatternly highway into London than this 
I have never trodden it. Yet Windsor Terrace 
alone clothes it in glory, and I should be grieved 
to see it cleaned or tidied or improved in any way, 
simply because, as it is, it is Windsor Terrace's fit 
and proper environment. There have been changes 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 87 

in it, but not enough, I am thankful to say, to spoil 
its mid- Victorian aspect ; it is still very much what 
it was when Micawber went up and down it, to and 
from his home here ; and of all the great humorous 
characters who live in the world's fiction there are 
only two greater than he, Falstaff being one and 
Don Quixote the other. 

Windsor Terrace is a high, drab street shaped like 
a funnel. The outer, crescent-shaped portions, with 
some half dozen houses in each, slope back from the 
City Road, and the open space thus left before the 
long, narrow channel of the rest of the street looks 
as if it should have been a sort of village green, but 
it is all paved over, and there is a lamp-post in the 
centre, two lamp-posts on each side, and dwarf 
iron pillars round about it instead of trees. Micawber 
lived in the wide part of the funnel, in one of these 
six houses on the city side of it : you know that as 
soon as you set eyes on them, for they are exactly 
in keeping with all we know of him, and so subtly 
answer to all the hints Dickens gives of the char- 
acteristics of his residence. They are tall, plain, 
shabby-genteel houses, with railed-in areas before 
their basement windows and steps up to their front 
doors. When David Copperfield arrived at the black- 
ing factory in Blackfriars Road, where he was to 
work with Mealy Potatoes and the other boys at 
labelling bottles, he was informed by the manager, 
Mr. Quinion, that his step-father had arranged for 
him to lodge with Mr. Micawber, and Mr. Micawber 
called during the morning to be introduced to his 
small lodger : 

" ' My address/ said Mr. Micawber, ' is Windsor Terrace, 



88 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

City Road. I — in short,' said Mr. Micawber, with the same 
genteel air, and in another burst of confidence — ' I live there.' 

" I made him a bow. 

" ' Under the impression/ said Mr. Micawber, ' that your 
peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, 
and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the 
arcana of the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City 
Road — in short/ said Mr. Micawber, in another burst of confi- 
dence, ' that you might lose yourself — I shall be happy to call 
this evening, and instal you in the knowledge of the nearest 
way.' . . . 

" Mr. Quinion then formally engaged me to be as useful as 
I could in the warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, at a salary, 
I think, of six shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was 
six or seven. I am inclined to believe, from my uncertainty 
on this head, that it was six at first and seven afterwards. He 
paid me a week down (from his own pocket, I believe), and I 
gave Mealy sixpence out of it to get my trunk carried to Windsor 
Terrace at night : it being too heavy for my strength, small as 
it was. I paid sixpence more for my dinner, which was a 
meat-pie and a turn at a neighbouring pump ; and passed the 
hour which was allowed for that meal, in walking about the 
streets. 

" At the appointed time in the evening, Mr. Micawber re- 
appeared. I washed my hands and face, to do the greater 
honour to his gentility, and we walked to our house, as I suppose 
I must now call it, together ; Mr. Micawber impressing the 
names of streets, and the shapes of corner houses upon me, 
as we went along, that I might find my way back easily in the 
morning. 

" Arrived at his house in Windsor Terrace (which I noticed 
was shabby like himself, but also, like himself, made all the 
show it could), he presented me to Mrs. Micawber, a thin and 
faded lady, not at all young, who was sitting in the parlour 
(the first floor was altogether unfurnished, and the blinds were 
kept down to delude the neighbours), with a baby at her breast. 
This baby was one of twins ; and I may remark here that I 
hardly ever, in all my experience of the family, saw both of the 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 89 

twins detached from Mrs. Micawber at the same time. One of 
them was always taking refreshment. There were two other 
children ; Master Micawber, aged about four, and Miss Micawber, 
aged about three. These, and a dark-complexioned young 
woman, with a habit of snorting, who was servant to the family 
and informed me before half-an-hour had expired that she was 
1 a Orfling,' and came from St Luke's workhouse in the neighbour- 
hood, completed the establishment. My room was at the top 
of the house, at the back : a close chamber ; stencilled all 
over with an ornament which my young imagination repre- 
sented as a blue muffin ; and very scantily furnished. . . . 

" Poor Mrs. Micawber ! She said she had tried to exert 
herself ; and so, I have no doubt, she had. The centre of the 
street-door was perfectly covered with a great brass plate, on 
which was engraved ' Mrs. Micawber's Boarding Establishment 
for Young Ladies : ' but I never found that any young lady 
had ever been to school there ; or that any young lady ever 
came, or proposed to come ; or that the least preparation was 
ever made to receive any young lady. The only visitors I ever 
saw or heard of were creditors. They used to come at all hours, 
and some of them were quite ferocious. One dirty-faced 
man, I think he was a bootmaker, used to edge himself into 
the passage as early as seven o'clock in the morning, and call 
up the stairs to Mr. Micawber — ' Come ! You ain't out yet, 
you know. Pay us, will you ? Don't hide, you know ; that's 
mean. I wouldn't be mean if I was you. Pay us, will you ? 
You just pay us, d'you hear ? Come ! ' Receiving no answer 
to these taunts, he would mount in his wrath to the words 
' swindlers ' and ' robbers ' ; and these being ineffectual too, 
would sometimes go to the extremity of crossing the street and 
roaring up at the windows of the second floor, where he knew 
Mr. Micawber was. At these times, Mr. Micawber would be 
transported with grief and mortification, even to the length 
(as I was once made aware by a scream from his wife) of making 
motions at himself with a razor ; but within half an hour 
afterwards, he would polish up his shoes with extraordinary 
pains, and go out humming a tune with a greater air of gentility 
than ever." 



90 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

When Mr. Micawber's affairs reached such a crisis 
that there was neither food in the house here nor 
money to buy any, Mrs. Micawber took David Copper- 
field into her confidence and, though she refused to 
accept a small loan, hinted that there were other 
ways in which he might be of service : 

" ' I have parted with the plate myself/ said Mrs. Micawber. 
' Six tea, two salt, and a pair of sugars I have at different 
times borrowed money on, in secret, with my own hands. But 
the twins are a great tie ; and to me, with my recollections of 
papa and mama, these transactions are very painful. There 
are still a few trifles that we could part with. Mr. Micawber's 
feelings would never allow him to dispose of them ; and 
Clickett ' — this was the girl from the workhouse — ' being of a 
vulgar mind, would take painful liberties if so much confidence 
was reposed in her. Master Copperfield, if I might ask you — ' 

" I understood Mrs. Micawber now, and begged her to make 
use of me to any extent. I began to dispose of the more port- 
able articles of property that very evening ; and went out on 
a similar expedition almost every morning, before I went to 
Murdstone and Grinby's. Mr. Micawber had a few books on a 
little chiffonier, which he called the library ; and those went 
first. I carried them, one after another, to a bookstall in the 
City Road — one part of which, near our house, was almost all 
bookstalls and birdshops then — and sold them for whatever 
they would bring. The keeper of the bookstall who lived in a 
little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be 
violently scolded by his wife every morning. More than once, 
when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up 
bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye, bearing 
witness to the excesses overnight (I am afraid he was quarrel- 
some in his drink), and he with a shaking hand endeavouring 
to find the needful shillings in one or other of the pockets of his 
clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife, with the baby 
in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off rating 
him. Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 91 

ask me to call again ; but his wife had always got some — had 
taken his, I dare say, while he was drunk — and secretly com- 
pleted the bargain on the stairs, as we went down together." 

That part of the City Road, " near our house " 
which was " almost all bookstalls and birdshops," 
was the part that faces the end of Windsor Terrace. 
It remained so, with little alteration, down to a 
few years ago ; shabby little bookshops with a litter 
of stalls before their frontages ; and I bought books 
at some of the bookstalls not knowing that, long 
before, David Copperfield had been there to sell 
them. They have been wiped right out now, and 
a mammoth furniture repository has usurped their 
place, but adjacent to it is a row of shops that are 
curiously reminiscent of those that are gone. Seeing 
them from a little way off the other evening, after 
the gas was alight, I thought for a moment they 
were a few of the old shops that had escaped destruc- 
tion, but a nearer view dispelled the illusion : they 
are new shops, larger than the old, with nothing of 
the snoozy quaintness of their predecessors, but 
there is a happy haphazard carelessness about the 
way in which the goods are just left lying about 
anyhow in their windows, and a general dusty, 
lounging air over them of waiting with your hands 
in your pockets for customers to drop in that is 
tantalisingly reminiscent of the older shops that 
David Copperfield knew. For, as I have said before 
and shall have occasion to say again, you cannot 
give a London street a new character by pulling it 
all down and giving it new houses. Sooner or later 
the old character subdues the new houses and asserts 
itself, generally with modifications, but not always. 



92 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Mr. Micawber's affairs came to such a pass that 
he was arrested for debt and conveyed to the King's 
Bench Prison in the Borough ; the furniture of the 
house in Windsor Terrace was nearly all sold and for 
a while David, Mrs. Micawber, the children, and the 
Orfling " encamped, as it were, in the two parlours 
of the emptied house in Windsor Terrace/ ' amid 
a small wreckage of bedding, chairs and a kitchen 
table. Then the family joined Mr. Micawber in the 
prison, and David, having taken the key of the house 
to the landlord, " who was very glad to get it," took 
a back garret over Southwark way, so as to be as 
near the Micawbers as possible. 

If you pass from the funnel-mouth of Windsor 
Terrace into its narrow throat, you find the tall 
houses here all built to the same pattern as those 
we associate with Micawber, but standing so much 
nearer together they have a dingier, gloomier aspect, 
that is only slightly mitigated in the case of one or 
two which have aenemic, draggled creepers stragg- 
ling over them. At the end of Windsor Terrace, 
turn off to the left, and a walk of five minutes, keep- 
ing straight on, will take you to the Hanover Street 
that Clem mentioned to Bob Hewett, where Jane 
Snowden was living with her grandfather. It is 
a quiet, out-of-the-way street of little houses which, 
except that three or four of them have been pulled 
down to make room for a County Council School, 
remains much as it was while Gissing was writing 
The Nether World. When old Mr. Snowden returned 
from abroad and found his grand-daughter, Jane, 
living in squalid, half-starved misery, the household 
drudge of Mrs. Peckover and Clem in Clerkenwell 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 93 

Close, he arranged to take her away, and Sidney 
Kirkwood, who had always pitied and befriended 
Jane, set himself to find lodgings for them. There 
was no accommodation to be had for them in Tysoe 
Street, Clerkenwell, where he lived himself, so he 
went farther afield : 

" He paid a visit the next evening to certain acquaintances 
of his named Byass, who had a house in Hanover Street, 
Islington, and let lodgings. Hanover Street lies to the north 
of City Road ; it is a quiet byway, of curving form, and con- 
sists of dwellings only. Squalor is here kept at arm's length ; 
compared with regions close at hand, this and the contiguous 
streets have something of a suburban aspect. Three or four 
steps led up to the house door. Sidney's knock summoned 
a young, healthy-faced, comely woman, who evinced a hearty 
pleasure at seeing who her visitor was. She brought him at 
once into a parlour on the ground floor. 

" ' Well, an' as I was only this mornin' tellin' Sam to go and 
look after you, or write a note, or somethin' ! Why can't you 
come round oftener ? I've no patience with you ! You just 
sit at 'ome an' get humped, an' what's the good of that, I 
should like to know ? I thought you'd took offence with me, 
an' so I told Sam. Do you want to know how baby is ? Why 
don't you ask, then, as you ought to do the first thing ? He's 
a good deal better than he deserves to be, the young rascal- 
all the trouble he gives me ! He's fast asleep, I'm glad to 
say, so you can't see him. Sam'll be back in a few minutes ; 
at least I expect him, but there's no knowin' nowadays when 
he can leave the warehouse. What's brought you to-night, 
I wonder ? You needn't tell me anything about the Upper 
Street business. / know all about that ! ' 

" ' Oh, do you ? From Clara herself ? ' 

" ' Yes. Don't talk to me about her ! There ! I'm sick 
an' tired of her — an' so are you, I should think, if you've any 
sense left.' " 

The Byasses are among the most natural as well 



94 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

as the most humorous of Gissing's characters ; 
humour being the rarest thing in his books. Sam 
Byass is a cheerful ass who is always doing and say- 
ing fatuously silly things under the impression that 
they are funny, his wife keenly appreciating his wit 
and encouraging it with shrieks of laughter. The 
cheap happiness of their lives and their foolish fond- 
ness of each other is as wonderfully realistic as the 
later stage of their career when they drift into mis- 
understanding and the grey tragedy of a separation. 
Mrs. Byass has rattled on a good deal about Clara 
Hewett, and Kirkwood's chequereed engagement to 
her, for some time before he can get a chance to 
touch on the object of his visit. Then he remarks, 
" I see you've still got the card in the window. I 
shouldn't wonder if I could find you a lodger for 
those two top rooms." The outcome of his negotia- 
tions is that Jane and her grandfather duly move 
into the two top rooms here, which must have been 
the attics, for the houses have otherwise only base- 
ments, and ground and first floors, and on one 
occasion you have Jane standing at the front door 
to watch the Byasses going forth on a short holiday : 

" Then she went upstairs. On the first floor the doors of 
the two rooms stood open, and the rooms were bare. The 
lodgers who had occupied this part of the house had recently 
left ; a card was again hanging in the window of Bessie's 
parlour. Jane passed up the succeeding flight and entered 
the chamber that looked out upon Hanover Street." 

Her grandfather sat smoking his pipe at the open 
window ; and " but for the cry of a milkman or a 
paper-boy in the street, no sound broke the quiet- 
ness of the summer morning." Thereafter, Sidney 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 95 

Kirkwood came often to the house and he and Jane, 
almost before they were aware of it, drifted into love 
with each other, but there was to be no happy ending 
to their pleasant romance, for reasons which we 
shall have to touch upon later. Jane's shifty and 
unscrupulous father, Joseph, before and after he 
had married Clem Peckover, was also a frequent 
visitor, hypocritically scheming to win his daughter's 
affection and to ferret out the truth as to the sup- 
posed wealth of his father, and on at least one 
occasion he went " strolling away from Hanover 
Street in Sidney's company." There was a rainy 
evening when Sidney, after he realised that he was 
in love with Jane, and shrank from seeing her, partly 
because of her grandfather's supposed wealth, partly 
because of his lingering loyalty to Clara Hewett, 
was wandering about Islington in search of new 
rooms for himself and " found himself at the end 
of Hanover Street, and was drawn to the familiar 
house ; not, however, to visit the Snowdens, but 
to redeem a promise recently made to Bessie Byass, 
who declared herself vastly indignant at the neglect 
with which he treated her. So, instead of going 
up the steps to the front door, he descended into 
the area." And there was a later day when, after 
old Snowden had died leaving no will and Joseph, 
who had come in for all the money, had deserted 
his wife and vanished, Clem provoked a furious scene 
with her ancient hag of a mother in Clerkenwell 
Close, and finished it by rushing impetuously, " out 
of Clerkenwell Close, up St. John Street Road, across 
City Road, down to Hanover Street, literally running 
for most of the time. Her knock at Mrs. Byass's 



96 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

door was terrific." She went storming in, in spite 
of Mrs. By ass's attempts to keep her out, and bullied 
and abused Jane for her father's rascality, until 
Mrs. Byass desperately threatened her with the 
police, and got her out and slammed the door on 
her. 

If you loiter along the street and think of these 
things you can hardly believe that they did not all 
happen here ; that these stones have not been 
trodden by the men and women who seem so real 
to you and whom the book makes you so intimately 
acquainted with. Gissing himself must have been 
up and down it many times, but you are not more 
acutely conscious of his presence here than of that 
of those people of his imagination. 

Continuing along Hanover Street, and Noel Street, 
you emerge upon Colebrook Row, and if you follow 
the winding of the Row, past the little white box 
of a cottage in which Charles Lamb used to live, 
you will find yourself in Upper Street, Islington, 
and the " Upper Street business " to which Mrs. 
Byass has referred was nothing worse than that 
Clara Hewett, tired of living penuriously with her 
father and step-mother, had taken her own wilful 
way and obtained a situation as waitress in a flashy 
eating-house in this thoroughfare, and here Sidney 
went to meet her. The place was known as " The 
Imperial Restaurant and Luncheon Bar," and has 
its counterpart in Upper Street to-day. 

" The front shone with vermilion paint ; the interior was 
aflare with many gas-jets ; in the window was disposed a 
tempting exhibition of ' snacks ' of fish, cold roast fowls, ham- 
sandwiches, and the like j whilst farther back stood a cooking- 




J^iqj-i S-r/zseT 
LAMd£TH 



f.ejiyi, 



dcaclc 



Mr. Egremout, benevolently inspired, opened a lecture hall in a room over a 
saddler's shop in High Street, Lambeth." 

Chapter 8 



UP AND DOWN THE CITY ROAD 97 

stove, whereon frizzled and vapoured a savoury mess of 
sausages and onions. Sidney turned away a few paces. The 
inclemency of the night made Upper Street — the promenade 
of a great district on account of its spacious pavement — 
less frequented than usual ; but there were still numbers of 
people about, some hastening homewards, some sauntering 
hither and thither in the familiar way, some gathered into 
gossiping groups. Kirkwood was irritated by the conversation 
and laughter that fell on his ears, irritated by the distant 
strains of the band, irritated above all by the fume of frying 
that pervaded the air for many yards about Mrs. Tubbs's 
precincts. He observed that the customers tending that way 
were numerous. They consisted mainly of lads and young 
men who had come forth from neighbouring places of enter- 
tainment. The locality and its characteristics had been 
familiar to him from youth upwards ; but his nature was not 
subdued to what it worked in, and the present fit of disgust 
was only an accentuation of a mood by which he was often 
posesssed." 

Clara came out, at last, and they went up the 
street together and " crossed by the ■ Angel ' and 
entered St. John Street Road," making for Clerken- 
well Close. 

Mr. Micawber would never have walked from 
Blackfriars Road to Windsor Terrace nowadays ; 
nor would Miss Evans and Mr. Samuel Wilkins have 
walked all the way from Camden Town to the Eagle ; 
we are pampered in the matter of travelling ac- 
commodation and have lost the pedestrian habit ; 
so we will take a tram from the Angel, which was 
one of the old coaching inns, but has been many 
times rebuilt, to Finsbury Pavement, and thence 
get back to the Bank, from which we started on our 
northern pilgrimage. 



CHAPTER V 

MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, AND SOME OTHERS 

WHEN Mr. Cheeryble discovered Nicholas 
Nickleby studying the advertisements in a 
Registry Office window and learned that he was in 
search of employment, he brought him from Oxford 
Street to the Bank in a bus and took him to the 
warehouse of Cheeryble Brothers, which was situ- 
ated in "a quiet shady little square," somewhere 
" along Threadneedle Street and through some lanes 
and passages to the right." I have never been able 
to identify that square, nor, I confess, have I ever 
been able to find two such heavenly men of business 
as the Cheery bles. In Threadneedle Street were 
the banking premises of that very different pair of 
brothers, Sir Brian and Hobson Newcome, and 
thither went Colonel Newcome to visit them, on 
his return after long absence abroad. It was in 
Threadneedle Street, too, that Gissing's swaggering 
Mr. Gammon, of The Town Traveller, walking from 
Norton Folgate towards the Bank, was overtaken 
on a memorable occasion by the mysterious Mr. 
Greenacre, and they retired, for purposes of con- 
versation, to the Bilboes, a snug place of refresh- 
ment " lurking in an obscure byway between the 
Bank and St. Paul's. " And just beyond the other end 
of Threadneedle Street, in New Broad Street, is Austin 



MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, ETC. 99 

Friars where, as you know if you have read Martin 
Chuzzlewit, John Westlock and Tom Pinch called at 
the office of Mr. Fips who had intimated that he was 
prepared to offer Tom, whom Mr. Pecksniff had re- 
cently discharged, an uncommonly pleasant situation. 

But there is more of interest up this other side of 
the Royal Exchange ; let us follow in the footsteps 
of Lucy Snowe, from Charlotte Bronte's Vilette, when 
she came out that March morning, on her first visit 
to London, came out full of eager excitement and 
" saw and felt London at last. ... I went up Corn- 
hill ; I mixed with the life passing along ; I dared 
the peril of crossings. . . . Since those days I have 
seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares ; 
but I love the City far better. The City seems so 
much more in earnest ; its business, its rush, its 
roar, are such serious things, sights, sounds." I, 
too, love the City better than the West End, not 
for Lucy Snowe's reasons, but only, I think, be- 
cause I have passed more of my days thereabouts 
and am more familiar with it. 

It is curious how, in much miscellaneous reading, 
one comes upon unimportant passages that for no 
reason at all, or merely because they happen to have 
flashed vivid pictures upon the mind, one readily 
recalls, whilst many others that are worthier of 
remembrance have been as easily forgotten. If I 
begin to cast about now for what memories I have 
of Cornhill, almost the first that I recapture is a 
vision of the street in early Stuart times, when it 
was made up of picturesque gabled buildings and 
goldsmiths and wealthy merchants lived over their 
shops and warehouses in it, and when the City train 



100 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

band, out for periodical exercise, marched past in 
the roadway in all its military bravery, watched 
by bright eyes from windows and doors. And this 
simply because of the advice that Meercraft gives 
to Gilthead, the goldsmith, as to the career he should 
choose for his son, in Ben Jonson's The Devil is an 
Ass : 

Gilthead. But now I had rather get him a good wife 
And plant him in the country, there to use 
The blessing I shall leave him. 

Meercraft. Out upon't ! 

And lose the laudable means thou hast at home here 
To advance and make him a young alderman ? 
Buy him a captain's place, for shame ; and let him 
Into the world early, and with his plume 
And scarfs march through Cheapside, or along Cornhill 
And by the virtue of those, draw down a wife 
There from a window worth ten thousand pound ! 

Or because of a strangely clear recollection I have 
of Sybil, the sprightly maid to Mistress Rose, 
daughter of Sir Roger Oatley, Lord Mayor of London, 
in Dekker's Shoemaker' s Holiday, and of how when 
Sybil goes to join her mistress, who is staying with 
friends at Old Ford, Rose asks whether she has seen 
young Lacy, the gallant she loves, but who is cold 
to her, and whether he sent " kind greetings to his 
love," and the maid answers that she had only seen 
him one day stalk past with his soldiers : 

" yes, out of cry, by my troth. I scarce knew him ; here 
* a wore a scarf ; and here a scarf, here a bunch of feathers, 
and here precious stones and jewels, and a pair of garters — 
O, monstrous ! like one of our yellow silk curtains at home 
here in Old Ford House here, in Master Bellymount's chamber. 
I stood at our door in Cornhill, looked at him, he at me, indeed, 



MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, ETC. 101 

spake to him, but he not to me, not a word. Marry go-up, 
thought I, with a wanion ! He passed by me as proud — Marry, 
foh ! you are grown humorous, thought I ; and so shut the 
door, and in I came." 

You can see the piquant face of the peering girl 
suddenly withdrawn as the disdainful lordling goes 
swaggering by, and it is the crisp snap of that door 
slamming that shatters our dream and wakes us 
to the fact that Sir Roger Oatley's shop is no longer 
visible on Cornhill. 

" The ' Banks of Jordan ' was a public-house in 
the city, which from its appearance did not seem to 
do a very thriving trade/' writes Anthony Trollope, 
in The Three Clerks. " You enter the ' Banks of 
Jordan ' by two folding doors in a corner of a very 
narrow alley behind the Exchange ; " and thither 
came Charley Tudor to keep an appointment with 
Mr. M'Ruen. The narrow alley is there yet, con- 
necting the open space at the back of the 
Exchange with Finch Lane ; there is still a restaurant 
there, and moreover you enter it by two folding 
doors, but its name is nothing like " The Banks of 
Jordan." It is probably a legitimate successor to 
the one that Trollope knew ; for where a public- 
house is pulled down in London, a new one generally 
rises from the ashes of the old. 

Before we proceed up Cornhill : here, beside the 
Exchange, the pillory used to stand, and in the 
summer of 1703 Defoe stood in it, as punishment 
for having published his " Shortest Way with the 
Dissenters," but he was so popular with the mob 
that instead of pelting him with mud and dead cats 
they swarmed round to applaud and protect him from 



102 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

insult and injury. He was at that time living 
farther up Cornhill, in Freeman's Court, where he 
carried on business as a hosier ; and rather more 
than a century later the famous letter from Messrs. 
Dodson and Fogg, announcing that they had been 
instructed by Mrs. Martha Bardell to commence an 
action for breach of promise of marriage against 
Mr. Samuel Pickwick, was dated from their offices, 
" Freeman's Court, Cornhill, August 28th, 1827." And 
you may picture Mr. Pickwick, with that letter in his 
pocket, striding indignantly up Cornhill, with Sam 
Weller, to that furious interview with Messrs. Dodson 
and Fogg which ended in Sam's desperately intervening 
and, without ceremony, hauling his master down 
the stairs, and down the court, " and having safely 
deposited him in Cornhill, fell behind, prepared to 
follow whithersoever he should lead. Mr. Pickwick 
walked on abstractedly, crossed opposite the Mansion 
House, and bent his steps up Cheapside ; " on his 
road to Gray's Inn to see his own lawyer, Mr. Perker. 
I am sorry that Freeman's Court was demolished 
over sixty years ago, but I have a conviction that 
if you explore Newman's Court you will see almost 
exactly what it looked like. 

In Birchin Lane Macaulay lived when he was a 
child ; and the poet Gray was born in a house that 
stood two doors this side of St. Michael's Alley. A 
little beyond the Alley, is St. Peter's Church, said 
to be the oldest Christian Church in London. It 
was founded, according to the inscription on an 
ancient tablet preserved in the vestry, in the year 
One hundred and ninety-seven. You must come 
here of an evening, when, as Henry S. Leigh has it, 



MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, ETC. 103 

Temples of Mammon are voiceless again — 
Lonely policemen inherit Mark Lane ; 
Silent is Lothbury — quiet Cornhill — 
Babel of Commerce, thine echoes are still ; 

if you would see the street as Bradley Headstone 
and Charley and Lizzie Hexam saw it on the 
occasion of their meeting when Lizzie was return- 
ing from one of her business visits to the gentle 
Jew, Riah, at the premises of Messrs. Pubsey and Co., 
in St. Mary Axe, Leadenhall Street. Her brother and 
Bradley Headstone lingered waiting for her here in 
Gracechurch Street, where Cornhill ends and Leaden- 
hall Street begins. In Gracechurch Street is one 
entrance to St. Peter's Alley, which makes two sides of 
a square round the walled-in churchyard at the back 
of the Church and comes out again into Cornhill ; 
and in this same St. Peter's Alley was enacted one of 
the most memorable scenes of Our Mutual Friend : 

" A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a 
hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an 
air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has 
an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many 
house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that 
seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom. 
... On such an evening, when the City grit gets into the 
hair and eyes and skin, and when the fallen leaves of the few 
unhappy City trees grind down in corners under wheels of wind, 
the schoolmaster and the pupil emerged upon the Leadenhall 
Street region, spying eastward for Lizzie. Being something 
too soon in their arrival, they lurked at a corner, waiting for 
her to appear. The best-looking among us will not look well 
lurking at a corner, and Bradley came out of that disadvantage 
very poorly indeed. 

" ' Here she comes, Mr. Headstone ! Let us go forward 
and meet her.' 



104 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

" As they advanced she saw them coming, and seemed 
rather troubled. But she greeted her brother with the usual 
warmth, and touched the extended hand of Bradley. 

" ' Why, where are you going, Charley, dear ? ' she asked 
him then. 

" ' Nowhere. We came on purpose to meet you.' 

" ' To meet me, Charley ? ' 

" ' Yes. We are going to walk with you. But don't let 
us take the great leading streets where everyone walks, and 
we can't hear ourselves speak. Let us go by the quiet back- 
ways. Here's a large paved court by this church, and quiet, 
too. Let us go up here.' 

" ' But it's not in the way, Charley.' 

" ' Yes it is,' said the boy, petulantly. ' It's in my way, 
and my way is yours.' 

" She had not released his hand, and, still holding it, looked 
at him with a kind of appeal. He avoided her eyes under 
pretence of saying, ' Come along, Mr. Headstone.' Bradley 
walked at his side — not at hers — and the brother and sister 
walked hand in hand. The court brought them to a church- 
yard ; a paved square court, with a raised bank of earth about 
breast-high, in the middle, enclosed by iron rails. Here, con- 
veniently and healthfully elevated above the level of the 
living, were the dead, and the tombstones ; some of the 
latter droopingly inclined from the perpendicular, as if they 
were ashamed of the lies they told. They paced the whole of 
this place once, in a constrained and uncomfortable manner, 
when the boy stopped and said : 

" ' Lizzie, Mr. Headstone has something to say to you.' " 

In spite of her appeal, he breaks away and leaves 
her alone with the schoolmaster, and hesitantly, 
apologetically, tumultuously Bradley Headstone tries 
to give utterance to his passion for her, and tells how 
his love for her and her dislike of him is ruining all 
his life. 

" Struggling with himself, and by times looking up at the 



MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, ETC. 105 

deserted windows of the houses as if there could be any- 
thing written in their grimy panes that would help him, 
he paced the whole pavement at her side, before he spoke 
again. 

" ' I must try to give expression to what is in my mind ; it 
shall and must be spoken. Though you see me so confounded 
— though you strike me so helpless — I ask you to believe that 
there are many people who think well of me ; that there are 
some people who highly esteem me ; that I have in my way 
won a station which is considered worth winning.' 

" ' Surely, Mr. Headstone, I do believe it. Surely I have 
always known it from Charley.' 

" f I ask you to believe that if I were to offer my home such 
as it is, my station such as it is, my affections such as they are, 
to any one of the best considered and best qualified and most 
distinguished among the young women engaged in my calling, 
they would probably be accepted. Even readily accepted. 
... I have sometimes had it in my thoughts to make that 
offer and to settle down as many men of my class do : I on 
the one side of the school, my wife on the other, both of us 
interested in the same work.' 

' Why have you not done so ? ' asked Lizzie. ' Why do 
you not do so ? ' 

" ' Far better that I never did ! The only one grain of 
comfort I have had these many weeks,' he said, always speak- 
ing passionately and, when most emphatic, repeating that 
former action of his hands, which was like flinging his heart's 
blood down before her in drops upon the pavement-stones ; 
I the only grain of comfort I have had these many weeks is, 
that I never did. For if I had, and if the same spell had come 
upon me for my ruin, I know I should have broken that tie 
asunder as if it had been thread.' 

" She glanced at him with a glance of fear, and a shrinking 
gesture. He answered, as if she had spoken. 

' ' No ! It would not have been voluntary on my part, any 
more than it is voluntary in me to be here now. You draw 
me to you. If I were shut up in a strong prison, you would 
draw me out. I should break through the wall to come to you. 



106 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

If I were lying on a sick bed, you would draw me up — to stagger 
to your feet and fall there.' 

" The wild energy of the man, now quite let loose, was 
absolutely terrible. He stooped and laid his hand upon a 
piece of the coping of the burial-ground enclosure, as if he would 
have dislodged the stone. 

" ' No man knows till the time comes, what depths are 
within him. To some men it never comes ; let them rest 
and be thankful ! To me, you brought it ; on me, you forced 
it ; and the bottom of this raging sea,' striking himself upon the 
breast, ' has been heaved up ever since.' 

" ' Mr. Headstone, I have heard enough. Let me stop you 
here. It will be better for you and better for me. Let us find 
my brother.' 

" ' Not yet. It shall and must be spoken. . . . Here is a 
man lighting the lamps. He will be gone directly. I entreat 
of you to let us walk round this place again. You have no 
reason to look alarmed ; I can restrain myself, and I will.' 

" She yielded to the entreaty — how could she do otherwise ? 
— and they paced the stones in silence. One by one the lights 
leaped up, making the cold grey church tower more remote, 
and then they were alone again. He said no more until they 
had regained the spot where he had broken off ; there, he 
again stood still, and again grasped the stone. In saying what 
he said then, he never looked at her ; but looked at it and 
wrenched at it. 

" ' You know what I am going to say. I love you. What 
other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot 
tell ; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some 
tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and 
which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could 
draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you 
could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything 
I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and 
disgrace . . . you could draw me to any good — every good 
— with equal force. ... I only add that if it is any claim 
on you to be in earnest, I am in thorough earnest, dreadful 
earnest.' " 



MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, ETC. 107 

She tells him as gently as may be that she has no 
love for him, and that there is no hope of any change 
coming over her feelings towards him. 

" ' Then/ said he, suddenly changing his tone and turning 
to her, and bringing his clenched hand down upon the stone 
with a force that laid the knuckles raw and bleeding ; ' then 
I hope that I may never kill him ! ' The dark look of hatred 
and revenge with which the words broke from his livid lips, and 
with which he stood holding out his smeared hand as if it held 
some weapon and had just struck a mortal blow, made her so 
afraid of him that she turned to run away. But he caught 
her by the arm. 

" ' Mr. Headstone, let me go. Mr. Headstone, I must call 
for help ! ' 

" * It is I who should call for help,' he said ; ' you don't 
know yet how much I need it.' " 

He controls himself, and she listens whilst he 
bares his heart and discloses his consuming jealousy 
of the genial, careless, shiftless Eugene Wrayburn, 
the dilletante barrister who has been paying her so 
much attention of late, and whilst she is trying to 
check or answer his wild talk, her brother saunters 
into view and she runs to him. Then Bradley 
Headstone gives in, and goes, saying enough to let 
his pupil know he has been rejected. Follows 
another scene in which Charley Hexam bullies and 
abuses his sister, and since she will not yield to his 
entreaties and insistence that she should study his 
interests, as she always has done before, and marry 
the schoolmaster, he renounces her for ever, in a 
blind fury, and leaves her in the gloomy Alley alone. 
As she stands there, with her face laid in her hands 
on the stone coping, Riah, the Jew, passes, speaks 
to her, recognises her and hearing what has happened, 



108 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

comforts her and sets out to walk home with her, 
but as they emerge into the main thoroughfare, 
they come upon Eugene Wrayburn, " loitering dis- 
contentedly by, and looking up the street, and down 
it, and all about.' ' He had come to walk home with 
her, " having dined at a coffee-house in this neigh- 
bourhood and knowing your hour ; " and though 
both Lizzie and old Riah discourage him from doing 
so, he gaily accompanies them as far as to Lizzie's 
lodgings, near Smith Square, Westminster. 

Haunted by the memory of that tensely dramatic 
scene, and by those five human figures, so vividly 
alive, though they never really lived, St. Peter's 
Alley is to me one of the most glamorous spots in 
London. Its churchyard wall, and some of its houses 
have been rebuilt or restored, but you feel still, if 
you pass round it after the lamps are lighted, that 
it is the exactly right setting for the poignant in- 
cident that Dickens placed there. 

We will not go into Leadenhall Street ; there is 
nothing there now that we need go out of our way 
to see. When I was a boy (it is strange that I am 
not yet used to the feeling that I am old enough to 
talk in this fashion) only a few doors up on the left 
of Leadenhall Street was a nautical instrument- 
maker's shop ; a squat, old-fashioned shop, its small- 
paned windows full of glitteringly bright brass and 
glass articles connected with the seafaring life ; 
and projecting from the doorpost, just above reach 
of one's head, was the painted wooden figure of a 
little midshipman who was for ever examining the 
opposite side of the road through what I believe 
is technically known as a sextant. I had read 



MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, ETC. 109 

Dombey and Son, and knew this was the shop of 
old Sol Gills, and I could never get by it without 
stopping to peer in at the bewildering collection of 
unfamiliar objects on show in the window. I often 
thought of making an excuse to go in, but never 
had the courage to do it. So far as I could see, 
glancing in at the door, the interior was precisely 
as Dickens describes it, and when you remember 
that not merely Sol Gills, but Captain Cuttle, and 
that remarkable person Captain Bunsby, Mr. Toots 
and the Game Chicken, Walter Gay, Florence 
Dombey, Susan Nipper, Rob the Grinder, and 
Brogley (the second-hand furniture dealer, of Bishops- 
gate Street Without, who was put in as a man-in- 
possession) all came and went to and from that shop, 
and several of them lived, from time to time, in the 
rooms over it, you may guess what a place of magic 
it was to me, and what a sacrilege it seemed to pull 
such a house down and rear a common, inglorious 
building in its place. I once made a special journey 
round to the Minories to see the little wooden mid- 
shipman outside the new shop there to which he 
had been transferred, but he looked so lost and 
desolate, so shorn of his happy past that I took no 
pleasure in seeing him ; and now he is gone from 
there also, and I have lost track of him. 

And it is no use going as far up Leadenhall 
Street as St. Mary Axe to discover the house in 
which Fascinating Fledgby carried on his money- 
lending business with that idyllic old Jew Riah 
to manage it, for with the exception of some 
half dozen houses at the Houndsditch end of 
the street all St. Mary Axe is new. There 



110 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

was a day when Sir Barnes Newcome, having 
got through with certain business at his bank in 
Threadneedle Street, " had occasion to go on 'Change, 
or elsewhere, to confer with brother capitalists, and 
in Cornhill behold he meets his uncle, Colonel New- 
come, riding towards the India House, a groom 
behind him." But the India House, where Charles 
Lamb was a clerk, is no longer left in Leadenhall 
Street ; the East India Chambers on the right of the 
street occupy the site of it. 

It is worth while, however, taking a stroll through 
Leadenhall Market, which you may enter either 
from Leadenhall or from Gracechurch Street, for 
here Tim Linkinwater, the Cheeryble Brothers' 
managing clerk, used to do his shopping, and boasted 
that he could " buy new-laid eggs in Leadenhall 
Market any morning before breakfast ; " and it was 
to the Blue Boar tavern (which you will search for 
in vain) in Leadenhall Market that Sam Weller 
went to keep an appointment with his father, and 
in the parlour of that hostelry he wrote the valentine 
to Mary, the housemaid, of which the elder Weller 
so profoundly disapproved, and there again that Sam 
vainly poured cold water on his father's suggestion 
that he should bring forward friends of his own 
at the trial of " Bardell v. Pickwick" in order to 
" prove a alleybi," and win the case. 

Early in the fifteenth century, Sir Symon Eyre, a 
draper, and Lord Mayor of London, built at his own 
expense at the corner of Leadenhall and Gracechurch 
Streets, a hall that was to be used "as a public 
granary for laying up corn against a time of 
scarcity." Dekker, over a century afterwards, used 



MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, ETC. Ill 

the fact in his comedy, The Shoemaker's Holiday : 
he makes Simon Eyre an eccentric shoemaker, living 
in Tower Street, and after he becomes Lord Mayor 
he builds the hall and entertains the King and a 
great company including his own workpeople. 
" Let's march together," says Firk, one of his men, 
to the others, " for the honour of St. Hugh to the 
great new Hall in Gracious Street corner, which 
our master, the new Lord Mayor, hath built ; " and 
after the banquet, the King greets him with, 

Nay, my mad Lord Mayor, that shall be thy name ; 

If any grace of mine can length thy life, 

One honour more I'll do thee : that new building, 

Which at thy cost in Cornhill is erected, 

Shall take a name from us — we'll have it called 

The Leadenhall, because in digging it 

You found the lead that covereth the same. 

Who cares how much of that is true ? I like this 
corner of Leadenhall Street because of its associa- 
tion with Dekker and his characters ; because his 
imagination played about it, and he saw it in his 
fancy with all his characters thronging along these 
streets and filtering into the new hall that grew old 
and passed away, yet is still here in its place, one 
of those imperishable dream-houses of London that 
our writers of books have built for us and tenanted 
with dream-people. 

Nowhere is the spirit of Dickens so all-pervading 
as it is hereabouts in the very heart of the City. 
He tells you, in his little sketch, " Bill-Sticking,' ' 
it was when he was " on Cornhill, near the Royal 
Exchange," that he saw a solemn procession of 
three advertising vans, and looking into one of 



112 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

the vans, whilst the driver was refreshing himself 
in a public-house, he saw and held converse with 
" the King of the Bill-Stickers. " Go round, and up 
the next turning, and Dickens has been there before 
you how many times and in what tumults of emotion ! 
For at No. 2 Lombard Street was the banking estab- 
lishment of Mr. George Beadnell, and whilst he was 
still in his teens Dickens fell madly in love with the 
banker's daughter, Maria. She was pretty, and a 
good deal of a coquette, and her father objected 
to her suitor, than a very young man of no means 
and no position. He used to get his friend, Henry 
Kolle, in love with one of Maria's sisters, to smuggle 
letters into the house for him ; he haunted the street 
in agonies of despair, seeking to see her, and later 
told Forster how his love for Maria Beadnell for 
four years excluded every other idea from his mind, 
and inspired him to work with a fierce determina- 
tion that " lifted me up into newspaper life and 
floated me away over a hundred men's heads." The 
romance ended ; Maria married a Mr. Winter, and 
Dickens saw no more of her for five-and-twenty 
years. Meanwhile, he had idealised her into the 
Dora of David Copperfield ; but when he met her 
again, she was so changed and he so disillusioned 
that she served him as a model also for Flora 
Finching, of Little Dorrit. 

Plough Court, Lombard Street, in which Alexander 
Pope was born, has lost every vestige of antiquity ; 
but on the opposite side of the road is George Yard, 
and up George Yard was the George and Vulture 
Tavern and Hotel, where, after Mrs. Bardell com- 
menced her action against him, Mr. Pickwick went 






~^m-- 




"" * .; DePTFOQD- 

Fred^fidcock 

Evelyn had a sitting in St. Nicholas Church, Defitford, and Marlowe is buried in 

the churchyard. Besant founded " The World Went Very Well Then'' on the 

Chronicles of Deptford, and on a tombstone in the Church of St. Nicholas. 

Chapter 8 



MR. PICKWICK, LIZZIE HEXAM, ETC. 113 

to stay, with Sam Weller. And it not only was 
there, but you will find it there still, at the top of 
the yard, crushed in and elbowed almost out of sight 
by new buildings, at the corner of Bengal Court and 
St. Michael's Alley. A rambling, two-century old 
place it is, with a few old houses surviving beside 
it to keep it company, and a bygone, out-of-date 
atmosphere folding about them all that takes you 
back into the past whenever you breathe it. Mr ; 
Pickwick was lodging at the George and Vulture 
when Mr. Jackson came round from Messrs. Dodson 
and Fogg's to serve subpoenas on Mr. Tupman and 
Mr. Snodgrass who were visiting him there ; Sam 
Weller used to take his dinner in the back room, 
and was summoned thence by a messenger to that 
meeting with his father in Leadenhall Market ; Mr. 
Perker called there more than once to see Mr. Pick- 
wick about his case. Returning from Bath, Mr. 
Pickwick, " attended, of course, by Sam, straight- 
way repaired to his old quarters at the George and 
Vulture," and " on the third morning after their 
arrival, just as all the clocks in the city were striking 
nine individually, and somewhere about nine hundred 
collectively, Sam was taking the air in George Yard, 
when a queer sort of fresh painted vehicle drove 
up, out of which there jumped, with great agility, 
throwing the reins to a stout man who sat beside 
him, a queer sort of gentleman who seemed made 
for the vehicle, and the vehicle for him." These 
were Mr. Namby and Mr. Smouch, of Bell Alley, 
Coleman Street, come to arrest Mr. Pickwick on a 
warrant for not paying the damages and costs awarded 
to Mrs. Bardell, and, as we have mentioned already, 
8 



114 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

they carried him off with them. It was to the 
George and Vulture that Mr. Pickwick returned 
after his happy release from the Fleet Prison ; and 
there that old Tony Weller came to him and would 
have endowed him with all his own savings, believ- 
ing it was poverty and not obstinacy that had made 
him submit to his imprisonment ; it was at the 
George and Vulture that Mr. Winkle stayed after 
his marriage with Arabella Allen ; and it was Mary, 
the pretty housemaid there, who won the heart of 
Sam Weller and married him at last. Yet no hint 
of its Pickwickian connections glorifies the outer 
walls of the tavern, and there is no intimation at 
the entrance to George Yard that the George and 
Vulture may be discovered with difficulty in the 
depths of it. 

Defoe's Colonel Jack committed one of his many 
thefts at the Gracechurch end of Lombard Street : 
he knocked down and robbed a woollen draper's 
apprentice, who was returning from a goldsmith's 
in Lombard Street to his master's shop in Grace- 
church Street. Master Heriot, the goldsmith, of 
The Fortunes of Nigel, had his home in Lombard 
Street, and some of the great scenes of the novel 
were enacted under his roof. And Falstaff used 
to come occasionally to Lombard Street, for does 
not Mistress Quickly tell the Sheriffs officers, Fang 
and Snare, whilst they are lurking in Smithfield 
ready to arrest Sir John if he comes there, that, if 
he does not arrive, " he's indited to dinner to the 
Lubber's Head in Lumbert Street, to Master 
Smooth's, the silkman " ? 



CHAPTER VI 

TO THE TOWER 

SOME of the scenes of Heywood's comedy, The 
Wise-Woman of Hogsdon, are laid in Gracechurch 
Street, and one of his characters, Sir Harry, whom 
he did not trouble to furnish with a surname, had 
his house here, and Sencer came to it, for the pur- 
poses of the plot, to lure Sir Harry's daughter away 
with a delightfully plausible bait : 

There is a cunning woman dwells not far, 
At Hogsdon, lady, famous for her skill. 
Besides some private talk that much concerns 
Your fortunes in your love, she hath to show you, 
This night, if it shall please you walk so far 
As to her house, an admirable suit 
Of costly needlework, which if you please 
You may buy under-rate for half the value 
It cost the making ; about six o'clock 
You may have view thereof, but otherwise, 
A lady that hath craved the sight thereof 
Must have the first refusal. 

What woman could resist such a cunningly blended 
temptation ? If it were not enough that she might, 
by means of the Wise-Woman's magic learn, some- 
thing about her lover ; there was the getting of that 
bargain, which might be snatched from her by an- 
other woman if she failed to arrive in time, and 
that in itself was irresistible. But, after all, my 

115 



116 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

chief interest in Gracechurch Street gathers about 
certain people who really existed. In 1830, William 
Hone, best remembered for his Every-Day Book, 
and his Table-Book, opened the Grasshopper coffee- 
house here, at No. 13. Hone had fallen on evil 
days ; his friends rallied round to set him up in 
business, and Lamb — you never come across Lamb 
doing anything that is not friendly and generous 
— took an active part in raising subscriptions to help 
him. Before the shop could be opened, when it 
was only half fitted up, Lamb sat in it writing to 
Southey for assistance and explaining Hone's cir- 
cumstances : " He is just now in a critical situation ; 
kind friends have opened a coffee-house for him in 
the City, but their means have not extended to the 
purchase of coffee-pots, credit for Reviews, news- 
papers, and other paraphernalia. So I am sitting 
in the skeleton of a possible Divan. . . . Those 
' Every-day ' and ' Table-Books ' will be a treasure 
a hundred years hence, but they have failed to make 
Hone's fortune." Over a hundred pounds was 
raised, Lamb starting the subscription with ten, 
and Hone kept the Grasshopper for three years, 
editing his Year Book from it, and filling his leisure 
with other literary and journalistic labours. 

Continuing out of Gracechurch into Bishopsgate 
Street, we follow, thereafter, much of the route 
defined by Iniquity, when Satan, the Great Devil, 
summoned him up for the guidance of Pug, the 
Little Devil, in The Devil is an Ass : 

Child of hell, this is nothing ! I will fetch thee a leap 
From the top of Paul's steeple to the standard in Cheap : 
And lead thee a dance through the streets without fail, 



TO THE TOWER 117 

Like a needle of Spain, with a thread at my tail, 

We will survey the suburbs and make forth our sallies 

Down Petticoat Lane . . . 

To Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and so to St. Kathern's, 

To drink with the Dutch there and take forth our patterns. 

Until five years ago, Crosby Hall occupied the right- 
hand side of Great Saint Helens, with its front on 
Bishopsgate Street ; and had its place both in the 
worlds of fact and of imagination. When its builder 
and first tenant, the grocer-alderman, Sir Thomas 
Crosby died, it was sold to Richard, Duke of Glou- 
cester, and he made it his palace after he was crowned 
Richard III. As such it appears in Shakespeare's 
drama of that King. In the second scene of the 
first act, you have Richard stopping the bier of 
Henry VI. in the street and beside it making violent 
love to Anne, the widow of the late King's murdered 
son, urging her, at length, to " repair to Crosby 
Place," and when he has buried " this noble King " 
and wet his grave with repentant tears, he will come 
and see her there. The next scene and three others 
— some of the greatest in the tragedy — are laid in 
the Palace itself. But since the Palace is gone (it 
has been re-erected at Chelsea, where it looks patheti- 
cally forlorn in alien surroundings) we are more 
intimately concerned now with the one scene, the 
fourth of the fourth act, which is enacted in the 
street before the Palace. Thither come Queen 
Margaret, widow of Henry VI., Queen Elizabeth, 
widow of Edward IV., and the Duchess of York, 
mother of the murdered Edward IV., of the murdered 
Clarence, and of Richard III., and when Elizabeth 
and the Duchess, mourning their bitter wrongs, 



118 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

seat themselves upon the ground in despair, more 
womanly than queenly, Margaret sinks down wearily 
beside them, saying : 

If ancient sorrow be most reverend, 

Give mine the benefit of seniory, 

And let my griefs frown on the upper hand. 

If sorrow can admit society, 

Tell o'er your woes again by viewing mine : 

I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him ; 

I had a Harry, till a Richard killed him : 

Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him ; 

Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him. 

Duchess. I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him ; 
I had a Rutland too, thou holp'st to kill him. 

Queen Margaret. Thou hadst a Clarence too, and Richard 
killed him. 
From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept 
A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death : 
That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes, 
To worry lambs, and lap their gentle blood, 
That foul defacer of God's handiwork, 
That excellent grand tyrant of the earth, 
That reigns in galled eyes of weeping souls, 
Thy womb let loose to chase us to our graves. 
! upright, just, and true-disposing God, 
How do I thank thee that this carnal cur 
Preys on the issue of his mother's body 
And makes her pew-fellow with others' moan. 

Duchess. ! Harry's wife, triumph not in my woes : 
God witness with me, I have wept for thine. 

Queen Margaret. Bear with me; I am hungry for 
revenge. . . . 

And by-and-by, enters " King Richard, and his 
Train, marching," to find his path impeded by these 
prostrate and distracted women ; and whilst he is 
cunningly comforting them and subtly winning 



TO THE TOWER 119 

them to condone his crimes, messenger after mes- 
senger arrives bringing him news of the rising against 
him all over the country, the beginning of the end 
of his power, till in a momentary irritation he strikes 
one of them with a frienzied, " Out on ye, owls ! 
nothing but songs of death ? " Then he learns 
that this man's tidings are more favourable, and 
presently the rascally Catesby hurries in to announce : 

My liege, the Duke of Buckingham is taken, 
That is the best news : that the Earl of Richmond 
Is with a mighty power landed at Milford 
Is colder news, but yet they must be told. 
King Richard. Away towards Salisbury ! while we reason 
here, 
A royal battle might be won and lost. 
Some one take order Buckingham be brought 
To Salisbury ; the rest march on with me. 

And so, with his soldiery, he passes away up the 
street to his death on the Tamworth battle-field. 
Did it all happen so ? It happened so in Shake- 
speare's imagination, and that is enough for us, and 
enough to hold us dreaming his dreams over again 
in this street of Bishopsgate till we lose sight of the 
long stretch of modern buildings, and of the buses 
and carts and modern traffic in the road, and can 
see the Palace back here again with its garden, the 
stately houses of great merchants, the pent-house 
shops, each with its sign hanging out before it, and 
the frowning Bishop's Gate stretching across the 
way between Wormwood Street and Camomile 
Street, and nearer to us the quaint church of St. 
Ethelburga, older even than the Palace, and still 
retaining its place, though it is so encroached upon 



120 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

and hemmed in by a huddle of little old shops that 
you may almost pass it without being aware of its 
existence. 

Across the road, where Palmerstone Buildings 
stand, was the Bull Inn, to which Hobson, the carrier 
used to drive from Cambridge, and in whose yard 
Burbage and Tarleton used to act Shakespeare's 
plays. Not far beyond it was the great mansion 
of Sir Thomas Gresham, whose tomb is in St. Helen's 
Church, which is down the court here, immediately 
beside the site of Crosby Palace, and is also older 
than the Palace was. In the church, too, are the 
tombs of Sir John Crosby, and of the merchant 
adventurer, William Bond, who succeeded Sir Thomas 
More, and More's son-in-law, William Roper, as 
tenant of Crosby Hall. 

Monopoly, in Webster's Westward Ho ! mentions 
that he is going " to sup to-night at the Lion in 
Shoreditch ; " and you gather from other references 
that he is often in that neighbourhood, but we are 
not going there even though Shoreditch is rich in 
literary associations. In Spitalfields, you may dis- 
cover without difficulty Sweet Lilac Walk, at whose 
Common Lodging House Dr. Luttrel, in Besant's 
Bell of St. Paul's, bought the small boy, Sammy, 
for five pounds ; after he was gone Sammy's old 
grandmother sent his shrewd little sister Sal to see 
where he was taken to, and she chased the four- 
wheel cab citywards, and it went " down Bishops- 
gate Street and Gracechurch Street : it turned west- 
ward to Cannon Street : at Queen Street it turned 
again to the south and crossed the river by South- 
wark Bridge." It stopped at a house on Bankside, 



TO THE TOWER 121 

where we shall arrive later on ; but we are not going 
to Spitalfields. Shoreditch and Spitalfields lie in 
the region beyond the end of Bishopsgate Street 
Without ; beyond Norton Folgate, in which was 
situated the business premises of Messrs. Quodling 
and Co. who employed Mr. Gammon, of Gissing's 
Town Traveller, and whence Mr. Gammon had come 
when Mr. Greenacre overtook him in Threadneedle 
Street. We are not even going so far along Bishops- 
gate Street Without as to Middlesex Street, which 
is the proper name of Petticoat Lane. Yet it is 
worth a visit, for since the days of Elizabeth it has 
been so much mentioned or described in stories, 
sketches and plays ; but you must visit it on a 
Sunday morning, for every Sunday morning it 
springs into phenomenal life and activity and an 
overflowing Jewish market rages from one end to 
the other of it and surges and roars in all the adjacent 
streets until past noon. It is Bartholomew Fair 
on a small scale : in the matter of entertainment 
it does not go much beyond shooting galleries, and 
gramophones, but toy-stalls, refreshment stalls, and 
stalls for the sale of all manner of goods are there 
in bewildering abundance and variety and all the 
shops put on a holiday air, with the shopkeepers 
shouting at their doors as they used to along Cheap- 
side in the days when Lydgate's Lackpenny came 
to London. 

Our way lies along Houndsditch, and we ought 
not to go so far down Bishopsgate Street as to Liver- 
pool Street, but it yawns so near, just across the 
road, that one is tempted to stray aside into it for 
a minute to Liverpool Street Station, because Gissing 



122 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

has touched it with romance. For a long time Polly 
Sparkes, of The Town Traveller, had been keeping 
Christopher Parish in suspense. He was employed 
at a small salary by Swettenham's, and she knew 
that as soon as he got a " rise " he would ask her 
to marry him, but she was not at all sure that it 
would be " good enough." He had been vainly 
trying to make money by competing for the dazzling 
prizes offered by a popular paper, and one day she 
has an excited telegram from him : 

" Great news. Do meet me at entrance to Liverpool 
Street Station one o'clock. Wonderful news." 

She assumes that he has got his rise — probably 
another five shillings a week — and keeps the appoint- 
ment in an uncertain frame of mind. 

" A little before one o'clock she was at Liverpool Street, 
sheltered from a drizzle that brought down all the smoke of 
myriad chimneys. A slim figure in overcoat and shining hat 
rushed through the puddles towards her, waving an umbrella 
to the peril of other people, speeding only less frantically. 

" ' Polly, I've got it.' He could gasp no more ; he seized 
her arm as if for support, 

" ' How much is it ? ' she asked calmly. 

" c Five hundred and fifty pounds ! Hyjene ! ' 

" ' What — five hundred and fifty a year ? ' 

" Christopher stared at her. ' You don't understand. 
The missing word. I've got it this week. Cheque for five 
hundred and fifty pounds. Hyjene I ' 

" ' Reely ! » 

" ' Look here — here's the cheque ! Hyjene ! ' 

" Polly fingered the paper, studied the inscription. All the 
time she was thinking that this sum of money would furnish 
a house in a style vastly superior to that of Mrs. Nibby's. Mrs. 
Nibby would go black in the face with envy, hatred and malice. 
As she reflected Christopher talked, drawing her to the least- 



TO THE TOWER 123 

frequented part of the huge roaring railway station. ' Will 
you, Polly ? Why don't you speak ? Do, Polly, do ! ' 

" She all but spoke, would have done but for an ear-rending 
whistle from an engine. 

" ' I shall have a rise, too, Polly. I'm feeling my feet at 
Swettenham's. Who knows what I may get to ? Polly, 
I might — I might some day have a big business of my own, 
and build a house at Eastbourne. It's all on the cards, Polly. 
Others have done it before me. Swettenham began as a clerk — 
he did. Think, Polly, five hundred and fifty pounds — Hyjene ! ' 

" She met his eye ; she nodded. 

" ' You will ? ' 

" ' Don't mind if I do.' 
' ' Hooray ! Hyjene for ever ! Hooray — ay — ay ! ' " 

Or at Liverpool Street Station we may meet three 
of Gissing's people whom we have seen before in these 
pages. Jane Snowdon, her grandfather, and Sidney 
Kirkwood, out of The Nether World, had arranged 
to go on a holiday together to Chelmsford — a holi- 
day fraught with brief happiness and long tragedy 
for two of them ; for it was whilst they were away 
there that Sidney and Jane realised that they loved 
each other. Jane had never been into the country 
before, and was in a fever of apprehensions till they 
had started : 

" The last week was a time of impatience, resolutely sup- 
pressed. On the Saturday afternoon Sidney was to meet them 
at Liverpool Street. Would anything happen these last few 
days — this last day — this last hour ? No ; all three stood 
together on the platform, and their holiday had already begun. 

" Over the pest-stricken regions of East London, sweltering 
in sunshine which served only to reveal the intimacies of 
abomination ; across miles of a city of the damned, such as 
thought never conceived before this age of ours ; above streets 
swarming with a nameless populace, cruelly exposed by the 



124 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

unwonted light of heaven ; stopping at stations which it 
crushes the heart to think should be the destination of any 
mortal ; the train made its way at length beyond the outmost 
limits of dread, and entered upon a land of level meadows, of 
hedges and trees, of crops and cattle." 

With its great gateways, its long, always busy 
approaches, its staircases and bridges, its high sweep 
of glass roof and many platforms, Liverpool Street 
is too like any other London terminus to need de- 
scribing in detail ; but I think of that last passage 
we have quoted, and a score of others from Gissing's 
works, when his critics tell us that he loathed and 
despised the poor he had been forced to live among 
and was never in sympathy with them. 

Houndsditch was originally a wide ditch just 
outside the City wall. When it was filled in and the 
street built, it seems to have fallen into the hands 
of the Jews, who are its chief inhabitants to this 
day. Second-hand clothes dealers are plentiful in 
the lanes and furtive alleys to the left which taper 
away towards Petticoat Lane ; and most of the 
names over the very miscellaneous shops of Hounds- 
ditch are the names of English or foreign Jews. One 
thing that warms me towards the street is a worn 
old tavern in it that is called the Ben Jonson. Now- 
adays the reputation of " Rare Ben " has contracted, 
and he is no god any longer except in literary 
circles ; but in his own age, and for years after, his 
name was familiar to the multitude ; he was a 
glorious magnetic personality in the social as well 
as in the theatrical life of his time, and it is signifi- 
cant of his popularity as a true Londoner that inns 
crowned with his name were dotted all about the 






TO THE TOWER 125 

town whose streets and byways are inseparably 
associated with him and his work. I have known 
several, and five of them still flourish, four in central 
London, and one as far afield as Harrow Road. 

We turn up St. Mary Axe, which we have already 
glanced at from the other end ; and I wish again 
there were more of the old houses left in it, and one 
that we might recognise as the house of Pubsey 
and Co. to the roof of which Riah, Jenny Wren and 
Lizzie Hexam would climb, to " come and be dead," 
to rest and chat and forget the worries of the world 
below under the wide sky, among the chimney- 
stacks. This being past praying for, however, we 
take the first turning to the left out of St. Mary Axe, 
and are in Be vis Marks, and here we are a little more 
fortunate. There is only one tavern in Bevis Marks ; 
it is on the eastern side, at an odd corner where the 
street falls away slightly before it merges into Duke 
Street ; and this is the public-house that enjoyed 
the patronage of no less a person than Dick Swiveller. 
The offices of Mr. Sampson Brass used to be here- 
abouts, and this was " Mr. Swiveller's usual house 
of entertainment in Bevis Marks." Quilp dropped 
in to see him in it one day just as he " sat down 
alone to dinner in its dusky parlour." From 
Sampson Brass's office Dick was in the habit of 
" darting across the street for a glass of mild porter," 
so you may make up your mind that the office was 
over the way, and over the way, until lately, sur- 
vived an old house that may well have been that 
which Sampson and his sister occupied. A mean, 
wizened, ghostly looking house, discoloured with age, 
that with its step or two up to the front door, its dull, 



126 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

low window, its grated basement, and the curious 
air of slyness and secrecy that brooded over it, 
seemed far more in harmony with all we know of the 
Brasses than does the larger house next but one to 
the tavern which has also strong points of resem- 
blance to the house as Dickens sketched it. He 
says it was " a small dark house/' and 

" In the parlour window of this little habitation, which is so 
close upon the footway that the passenger who takes the wall 
brushes the dim glass with his coat-sleeve — much to its im- 
provement, for it is very dirty — in this parlour window, in the 
days of its occupation by Sampson Brass, there hung, all awry 
and slack and discoloured by the sun, a curtain of faded green, 
so threadbare from long service as by no means to intercept 
the view of the little dark room, but rather to afford a favour- 
able medium through which to observe it accurately. There 
was not much to look at. A rickety table, with spare bundles 
of papers, yellow and ragged from long carriage in the pocket, 
ostentatiously displayed upon its top ; a couple of stools, set 
face to face on opposite sides of this crazy piece of furniture ; 
a treacherous old chair by the fireplace, whose withered arms 
had hugged full many a client and helped to squeeze him dry j 
a second-hand wig-box, used as a depository for blank writs 
and declarations and other small forms of law, once the sole 
contents of the head which belonged to the wig which belonged 
to the box, as they were now of the box itself ; two or three 
common books of practice ; a jar of ink, a pounce box, a 
stunted hearth-broom, a carpet trodden to shreds but still 
clinging with the tightness of desperation to its tacks — these, 
with the yellow wainscot of the walls, the smoke-discoloured 
ceiling, the dust and cobwebs, were among the most prominent 
decorations of the office of Mr Sampson Brass. But this 
was mere still-life, of no greater importance than the plate, 
' Brass, Solicitor,' upon the door, and the bill, c First floor 
to let to a single gentleman,' which was tied to the knocker. 
The office commonly held two examples of animated nature. 



TO THE TOWER 127 

... Of these, one was Mr Brass himself. . . . The other was 
his clerk, assistant, housekeeper, secretary, confidential plotter, 
adviser, intriguer, and bill of cost increaser, Miss Brass — a 
kind of amazon at common law ... a lady of thirty-five or 
thereabouts, of a gaunt and bony figure, and a resolute bearing 
which, if it repressed the softer emotions of love and kept 
admirers at a distance, certainly inspired a feeling akin to awe 
in the breasts of those male strangers who had the happiness 
to approach her." 

Not only the house of Sampson Brass in Bevis 
Marks and the tavern nearly opposite, but the whole 
of the street itself belong to The Old Curiosity Shop. 
The parlour of that small dark house was the clerks' 
office of the Brass establishment, and for a time 
Dick Swiveller and Sally sat in it daily, facing 
each other at the tall desk, and despite the lady's 
stern, forbidding aspect, the blandishments of Dick 
Swiveller were so potent with her that after a while 
he could with impunity snatch off her fluttering 
head-dress to rub the window clean when he wanted 
to look out. In the basement under the office toiled 
that pitiable little drudge, the Marchionesss, whom 
Dick secretly befriended. Didn't he go down, when 
Sampson and Sally were out, and produce a pack 
of cards and initiate her into the mysteries of a 
game ? Didn't he, on at least one occasion, slip 
across the road to his favourite tavern and return 
followed by the potboy carrying a sumptuous meal 
on a tray for that same Marchioness ? To the office 
Kit came again and again, and in the office, having 
sent Dick out, Sampson from time to time inter- 
viewed the boy and matured his plan for having a 
certain bank-note found upon Kit's person in order 



128 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

that he might have him arrested on a charge of 
stealing it. And to the office one morning came 
that gay spirit, Mr. Chuckster, one of Mr. Swiveller's 
boon companions and a brother-member of the 
Glorious Apollos. He rang the bell, Dick opened, 
and Mr. Chuckster greeted him with characteristic 
facetiousness : 

" ' You're devilish early at this pestiferous old slaughter- 
house/ said that gentleman, poising himself on one leg and 
shaking the other in an easy manner. 

1 Rather/ returned Dick. 

' Rather ! ' returned Mr. Chuckster, with that air of graceful 
trifling which so well became him. ' i" should think so. Why, 
my good feller, do you know what o'clock it is — half past 
nine a.m. in the morning ? ' 

' Won't you come in ? ' said Dick. ' All alone. Swiveller 
solus. " 'Tis now the witching — " 

1 " Hour of night ! " 

' " When churchyards yawn," 

' " And graves give up their dead." 

' At the end of this quotation in dialogue, each gentleman 
struck an attitude, and immediately subsiding into prose 
walked into the office. Such morsels of enthusiasm are common 
among the Glorious Apollos, and were indeed the links that 
bound them together and raised them above the cold dull earth. 

' Well, and how are you, my buck ? ' said Mr. Chuckster, 
taking a stool. ' I was forced to come into the City upon 
some little private matters of my own, and couldn't pass the 
corner of the street without looking in, but upon my soul 
I didn't expect to find you. It is so everlastingly early.' " 

Their conversation is presently interrupted by 
the arrival of Kit, and just after Kit has been called 
away upstairs by the single gentleman who is lodging 
there and who has heard his voice, Sampson and 
Sally Brass come in from breakfast ; at sight of 




3anksid6 

freciyiclcock 



" Quite the cleanest and most respectable house on the Bank Side" wherein 
Lawrence Waller had taken lodgings. Besant. " The Bell of St. Paul's." 

Chapter S . 



TO THE TOWER 129 

them Mr. Chuckster retires ; Sampson despatches 
Mr. Swiveller with a letter to Peckham Rye, then 
taps his nose to his sister, who leaves him alone, 
and he waits thus till Kit comes down from the 
lodger, when he beckons him into the office with 
his pen, chats with him of Quilp, and tips him 
generously, in pursuance of that scheme for his 
downfall. Quilp was in and out of the office fre- 
quently. The single gentleman, lodging upstairs, 
was, you know, little Nell's uncle, the younger son 
of that old grandfather with whom she went on her 
eventful wanderings. He was drawn to the lodg- 
ings partly by that bill tied to the knocker, and 
partly no doubt by a knowledge of Sampson Brass's 
connection with the two wanderers whom he was 
anxious to find. He had learned that they were 
last seen in the company of those strolling Punch 
and Judy proprietors, Messrs Codlin and Short, 
and his efforts to meet or hear news of them accounted 
for some of those eccentricities of his that annoyed 
and puzzled Sampson and his sister : 

" The single gentleman among his other peculiarities — 
and he had a very plentiful stock, of which he every day 
furnished some new specimen — took a most extraordinary and 
remarkable interest in the exhibition of Punch. If the sound 
of a Punch's voice, at ever so remote a distance, reached 
Bevis Marks, the single gentleman, though in bed and asleep, 
would start up and hurrying on his clothes, make for the spot 
with all speed, and presently returned at the end of a long 
procession of idlers, having in the midst the theatre and its 
proprietors. Straightway, the stage would be set up in front 
of Mr. Brass's house ; the single gentleman would establish 
himself at the first floor window ; and the entertainment 
would proceed, with all its exciting accompaniments of fife 



130 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

and drum and shout, to the excessive consternation of sober 
votaries of business in that silent thoroughfare. It might 
have been expected that when the play was done both players 
and audience would have dispersed ; but the epilogue was as 
bad as the play, for no sooner was the Devil dead, than the 
manager of the puppets and his partner were summoned by the 
single gentleman to his chamber, where they were regaled 
with strong waters from his private store, and where they held 
long conversations, the purport of which no human being 
could fathom. But the secret of these discussions was of little 
importance. It was sufficient to know that while they were 
proceeding, the concourse without still lingered round the 
house ; that boys beat upon the drum with their fists, and 
imitated Punch with their tender voices ; that the office 
window was rendered opaque by flattened noses and the key- 
hole of the street door luminous with eyes ; that every time 
the single gentleman or either of his guests were seen at the 
upper window, or so much as the end of one of their noses was 
visible, there was a great shout of execration from the excluded 
mob, who remained howling and yelling and refusing consolation, 
until the exhibitors were delivered up to them to be attended 
elsewhere. It was sufficient, in short, to know that Bevis 
Marks was revolutionised by these popular movements, and 
that peace and quietness fled from its precincts." 

Sampson Brass was particularly exasperated by 
this state of things, but he could not afford to put 
his foot down and lose an uncommonly profitable 
lodger ; Mr. Swiveller, however, enjoyed it, and he 
and Sally generally watched the performances from 
their window ; until a day came when the men with 
Punch turned out to be Codlin and Short themselves, 
and the single gentleman had no interest in such 
shows thereafter. It is glory enough for Bevis 
Marks that Codlin and Short once performed in it 
before Mr. Brass's door; and if you say that none 



TO THE TOWER 131 

of these things ever really happened, I would like 
you to tell me of anything in Bevis Marks's history 
that seems more real. There is a synagogue close by 
in Bury Street that was attended by Isaac D' Israeli ; 
Lord Beaconsfield, in his boyhood, went there 
with his father, till they seceded from the Jewish 
faith ; but for every one who associates Bevis Marks 
with them now there are at least a thousand who 
associate it with the Brasses and Quilp, with Dick 
Swiveller and the Marchioness, with Codlin and 
Short and the tale of Little Nell. 

Wherever you go about central London you pass 
by places that Defoe has made memorable in his 
Journal of the Plague. He tells you of the dis- 
tracted preachers who haunted the streets : of one 
in particular who went hither and thither by day 
and night crying out dreadfully, " Yet forty days, 
and London shall be destroyed." He tells you 
how in those days of desolation he (or the imaginary 
writer of the Journal) saw the grass growing along 
Bishopsgate, and the dead being buried in great 
pits in Hand Alley, Bishopsgate, and in Petticoat 
Lane ; but some of the most terribly vivid incidents 
he describes have Houndsditch for their scene ; 
as thus : 

" As I went along Houndsditch one morning about eight 
o'clock, there was a great noise . . . the outcry was loud 
enough to prompt my curiosity, and I called to one, who looked 
out of a window, and asked what was the matter. A watch- 
man, it seems, had been employed to keep his post at the door 
of a house which was infected, or said to be infected, and 
was shut up. He had been there all night, for two nights 
together, as he told his story, and the day watchman had 



132 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

been there one day, and was now come to relieve him. All 
this while no noise had been heard in the house, no light had 
been seen, they called for nothing, had sent him no errands, 
which used to be the chief business of the watchmen, neither 
had they given him any disturbance, as he said, from Monday 
afternoon, when he heard a great crying and screaming in the 
house, which, as he supposed, was occasioned by some of the 
family dying just at that time. It seems the night before, 
the dead-cart, as it was called, had been stopped there, and a 
servant maid had been brought down to the door dead, and 
the buriers or bearers, as they were called, put her into the 
cart, wrapped only in a green rug, and carried her away. The 
watchman had knocked at the door, it seems, when he heard 
that noise and crying, as above, and nobody answered a great 
while ; but at last one looked out and said, with an angry 
quick tone, and yet in a kind of crying voice, or a voice of one 
that was crying, ' What d'ye want, that you make such a 
knocking ? ' He answered, ' I am the watchman ; how do 
you do ? What is the matter ? ' The person answered, 
1 What is that to you ? Stop the dead-cart.' This it seems 
was about one o'clock ; soon after, as the fellow said, he stopped 
the dead-cart, and then knocked again, but nobody answered. 
He continued knocking, and the bellman called out several 
times, ' Bring out your dead ; ' but nobody answered, till the 
man that drove the cart being called to other houses, would 
stay no longer, and drove away. 

" The watchman knew not what to make of all this, so he let 
them alone till the morning-man, or day-watchman as they 
called him, came to relieve him ; giving him an account of the 
particulars, they knocked at the door a great while, but nobody 
answered, and they observed that the window or casement at 
which the person looked out who had answered before, con- 
tinued open, being up two pair of stairs. Upon this the two 
men, to satisfy their curiosity, got a long ladder, and one of 
them went up to the window and looked into the room, where 
he saw a woman lying dead upon the floor, in a dismal manner, 
having no clothes on her but her shift ; but though he called 
aloud, and putting in his long staff knocked hard on the floor, 



TO THE TOWER 133 

yet nobody stirred or answered, neither could he hear any 
noise in the house. He came down again upon this, and 
acquainted his fellow, who went up also, and rinding it just so, 
they resolved to acquaint either the Lord Mayor or some other 
magistrate of it, but did not offer to go in at the window. 
The magistrate, it seems, upon the information of the two men, 
ordered the house to be broke open, a constable and other 
persons being appointed to be present that nothing might be 
plundered ; and accordingly it was so done, when nobody was 
found in the house but that young woman who, having been 
infected and past recovery, the rest had left her to die by 
herself, and every one gone, having found some way to delude 
the watchman and to get open the door, or get out at some 
back-door, or over the tops of the houses, so that he knew 
nothing of it ; and as to those cries and shrieks which he heard, 
it was supposed they were the passionate cries of the family 
at this bitter parting, which to be sure it was to them all, this 
being the sister to the mistress of the family. The man of 
the house, his wife, several children and servants, being all 
gone and fled, whether sick or sound, that I could never learn, 
nor, indeed, did I make much enquiry after it." 

But of Defoe's Houndsditch pictures none takes 
such a strong hold on the imagination and the memory 
as his lurid, unforgettable description of the plague 
pit that was dug in the churchyard there, and of 
some of the bizarre incidents that happened around 
it. The church of St. Botolph, Aldgate, stands at 
the eastern corner of Houndsditch, and at the back 
of the churchyard still runs the Alley that Defoe 
mentions ; it opens out of Houndsditch, and beyond 
the wall of the churchyard turns to the right and 
brings you into Aldgate, by the Three Nuns Tavern, 
a successor to the inn of the same name that figures 
in the Journal of the Plague. The imaginary citizen 
who kept the Journal lived in Aldgate, and says 



134 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

he never had any fears for his own safety until " they 
dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish 
of Aldgate." He describes it as a " dreadful gulf," 
and says that people of the parish protested against 
the unnecessary size of it, but the churchwardens 
knew what they were about, many other pits had 
already been filled, and this too was full before the 
plague ended : 

" A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity 
to go and see it ; as near as I may judge, it was about forty 
feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad ; and, 
at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep ; but it 
was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards, in one 
part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water. . . . 
I doubt not but that there may be some ancient persons alive 
in the parish who can justify the fact of this, and are able to 
show even in what place of the churchyard the pit lay better 
than I can ; the mark of it also was many years to be seen in 
the churchyard on the surface, lying in length parallel with 
the passage which goes by the west wall of the churchyard, 
out of Houndsditch, and turns east again into Whitechapel, 
coming out near the Three Nuns Inn." 

The entry relating to this dreadful pit is too long 
for quotation in full. The writer tells, in Defoe's 
minutely realistic fashion, of the horrors and tragic 
misery that happened about its black depth ; how 
the carts came up by night loaded with the dead 
who were flung into it ; how in the light of fires and 
torches that flared beside it, men grief -stricken by 
the loss of all they loved would come crying and 
raging desperately to the pit's edge ; how poor 
wretches, mad with knowing that the plague was 
upon them, would rush across the churchyard and 
hurl themselves down upon the massed bodies heaped 



TO THE TOWER 135 

in that appalling hole. On the ioth September 
1665, says the writer of the Journal, " my curiosity 
led, or rather drove me to go and see this pit again/ ' 
By day, loose earth was strewn over those who lay 
in it ; so he " resolved to go in the night, and see 
some of them thrown in." He knew the sexton, 
who was willing to admit him into the churchyard 
but was trying to dissuade him from the risk of 
going, when " I saw two links come over from the 
end of the Minories " (which is almost opposite the 
church), " and heard the bellman, and then appeared a 
dead-cart, as they called it, coming over the streets ; 
so I could no longer resist my desire of seeing, 
and went in." He found lingering by the pit, a 
weeping wretch wrapped in a brown cloak ; his wife 
and several of his children were in this cart that was 
just arriving, and when he saw " the cart turned 
round and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously/ ' 
he was so overcome that he fell in a swoon. When 
he recovered, the bearers " led him away to the 
Pye Tavern, over against the end of Houndsditch, 
where, it seems, the man was known, and where 
they took care of him/' As the author of the Journal 
was leaving the churchyard, " and turning up the 
street towards my own house, I saw another cart, 
with links, and a bellman going before, coming out 
of Harrow Alley, in the Butcher-row, on the other 
side of the way ; " it was full of bodies and came 
directly to the church. He goes on to tell you of 
that Pye Tavern. It had become the haunt of " a 
dreadful set of fellows " in whom the plague had 
produced a spirit of godless and reckless defiance ; 
they drank and revelled there roaringly. " They 



136 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

sat generally in a room next the street ; and as they 
always kept late hours, so when the dead-cart came 
across the street end to go into Houndsditch, which 
was in view of the tavern windows, they would 
frequently open the windows as soon as they heard 
the bell, and look out at them ; and as they might 
often hear sad lamentations of the people in the 
streets, or at their windows, as the carts went along, 
they would make their impudent mocks and jeers 
at them, especially if they heard the poor people 
call upon God to have mercy upon them, as many 
would do at those times, in their ordinary passing 
along the streets/' 

Is it possible to imagine that such a Walpurgis- 
night tavern ever stood among the dingy, decorous 
shops at this end of Houndsditch, with those devil- 
may-care drunkards lolling from its windows making 
the ghastly nights more hideous ? It has vanished 
like a nightmare ; yet I cannot tread that end of 
Houndsditch without having the light of those links 
flickering in my eyes, the rumble of the dead-cart, 
the clang of the bell and those raucous voices in my 
ears. Here still is the churchyard, once a place of 
wildest, darkest horror, looking peaceful enough 
now in the afternoon sunlight, with its worn, old 
tombstones brooding amid the long grass, the scar 
of that grisly pit so completely healed that you can 
see no trace of it. 

If we take the ancient passage out of Hounds- 
ditch, by the wall at the back of the churchyard, 
we walk near the edge of the fearsome, invisible 
pit ; and following the turn of the passage, to the 
right, we emerge upon Aldgate, against the Three 



TO THE TOWER 137 

Nuns Tavern. Aldgate — the gate itself — used to 
stand to the west of Houndsditch (Chaucer for a 
time lived in a house over the gateway) ; and Defoe's 
imaginary writer of the Journal says, " I lived with- 
out Aldgate, about midway between Aldgate Church 
and Whitechapel Bars, on the left hand, or north 
side of the street." So he must have lived facing 
the Butcher Row that he talks of, and that still 
stands, retaining its ancient character and much 
of its ancient aspect. If you have read the Journal 
of the Plague and Harrison Ainsworth's best novel, 
Old St. Paul's (which draws freely on Defoe for its 
scenes and incidents), all London, from Holborn and 
the Strand to Aldgate, is curiously, eerily alive for 
you with memories of that blackest year in the 
city's history ; certain streets and corners are for 
ever inseparable from some sharply definite develop- 
ment of the plague, and nearly all these remem- 
brances are charged with pain and terror, but at 
the corner of the Minories, whence Defoe's Journalist 
saw the links coming with the dead-cart, there is 
a quaver of lighter voices in the air — of voices full 
of a relief and thankfulness that strangely touches 
your emotions ; for Defoe (or his Journalist) records 
how, when the worst of the plague was over, and 
the citizens moving abroad more freely again, 

" It was a common thing to meet people in the street that 
were strangers, and that we knew nothing at all of, expressing 
their surprise. Going one day through Aldgate, and a pretty 
many people being passing and repassing, there comes a man 
out of the end of the Minories, and looking a little up the 
street and down, he throws his hands abroad : Lord, what 
an alteration is here ! Why, last week I came along here and 



138 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



hardly any body was to be seen. Another man, I heard him, 
adds to his words : 'Tis all wonderful, 'tis all a dream. Blessed 
be God, says a third man, and let us give thanks to Him, for 
'tis all His own doing. Human help and human skill was at 
an end. These were all strangers to one another ; but such 
salutations as these were frequent in the street every day ; 
and in spite of a loose behaviour, the very common people 
went along the streets giving thanks to God for their 
deliverance." 



Our way lies through the Minories, but before we 
go on I want to make a flying visit to one or two 
places farther eastwards. The literary associations 
of the East End need a book to themselves ; it is 
impossible to deal adequately with them here, where 
considerations of space keep us from straying much 
beyond the square mile of the actual city of London. 
Aldgate, Whitechapel, Mile End — they were all 
common ground for the Elizabethan playwrights ; 
the train bands used to march out for practice at 
Mile End, and I have an odd kindness to that " Ned 
of Aldgate," the drummer of whom casual, passing 
mention is made in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight 
of the Burning Pestle, one scene of which is laid at 
Mile End. The shadow of Defoe's ubiquitous Colonel 
Jack roams all about Whitechapel, Bethnal Green 
and Mile End : his clothes being worn to rags, the 
young rapscallion went into a broker's shop near 
Whitechapel church and laid out part of his share 
of a recent robbery on the purchase of a new suit, 
and afterwards went into the churchyard to put 
the things on. The Journal of the Plague tells grisly 
tales of Whitechapel ; the Bull Inn, Whitechapel, 
was a stopping place of the coach driven by Mr. 



TO THE TOWER 139 

Weller, and Mr. Pickwick set out thence on his journey 
to Ipswich, and discoursed with Mr. Weller on the 
queerness of the lives lived by turnpike keepers as 
they passed the Mile End turnpike ; and when the 
small David Copperfield first came to London, from 
Blunderstone, in Suffolk, he was set down at an inn 
" in the Whitechapel district. ... I forget whether 
it was the Blue Bull, or the Blue Boar ; but I know 
it was the Blue Something, and that its likeness was 
painted on the back of the coach ; " and here Mr. 
Mell, the poor usher of Mr. Creakle's school met 
him and took him on to Blackheath. But Dickens 
is all about the East End ; he and Sala have left 
sketches of its highways and byways, and many 
scenes of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend 
take place in its most squalid quarters. Rogue 
Riderhood lived at Limehouse, and Miss Abbey 
Potterson kept the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters 
there by the waterside. Gissing went little into the 
east ; he found squalor and drabness enough for 
his purposes among the lives that were lived in the 
north and the south of London. No novelist of 
recent years was more closely identified with the 
East End than Sir Walter Besant ; he knew the 
east, its slums and its grinding poverty, the manners 
and habits of its people, the peculiar characteristics 
of every part of it, and knew them intimately. He 
was a born teller of readable tales, but he lacked 
the touch of genius that would have enabled him 
to make his characters live and his tales immortal. 
Already for a modern reader, they are a little old- 
fashioned, a little dull. In one or two of them he 
is so bent on using his wide knowledge of past and 



140 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

present London that they are less novels than guide- 
books in disguise ; in all of them he writes more 
as a romancist than a realist, and in some of them 
more as a reformer than as a romancist. His favourite 
scheme was to have some very wealthy man or girl 
and to send him or her to work in the East End for 
the betterment of the poor ; he was too much taken 
up with propaganda ; he was full of sympathy for 
those who slaved and starved and lived miserably 
in London's underworld, but he went among them 
not in the spirit of an artist, keen to study char- 
acter and realise and reveal things as he saw them, 
but in the spirit of the University Settlement worker, 
the kindly, conscientious philanthropist who was 
anxious to get up facts and expound them and 
lecture about them and show how the worst evils 
of poverty might be ameliorated. Too frequently, 
the artist is altogether lost in the social reformer ; 
but though his novels are dying they were not written 
in vain. They were written with a purpose, and 
something of their purpose has been achieved. He 
will be remembered at the end of the day, I think, 
as a nineteenth-century Stow (his topographical 
works have an abiding historical value), and as the 
author of All Sorts and Conditions of Men — not 
because that is the most interesting, the best imagined 
or the ablest of his many novels, but because its 
dream of the wealthy young lady who went to dwell 
among the poor of Stepney, set up in business and 
found work for the girls of the neighbourhood, estab- 
lished a Club for them, and finally reared a Palace 
of Delight which should serve as a centre of mental 
and physical training and general social intercourse 



TO THE TOWER 141 

for all the poverty-bitten district, resulted in the 
building and endowing of the People's Palace, which 
stands in the Mile End Road and is Besant's truest 
and sufficient monument. Poets and novelists have 
often enough dreamed dreams in which their fellow men 
have been uplifted and in divers ways made happier, 
but when before did any poet or novelist see his 
thought so quickly and exactly materialised in actual 
brick and stone ? If you have been to some of the 
lectures, concerts and meetings there you will know 
the People's Palace is an oasis of light and refresh- 
ment in a dark and desert place. I was wandering 
along Mile End Road one dismal Sunday evening, 
not long after Besant had died, and noting the 
announcement of an organ recital posted outside 
the Palace I went in and sat in the great hall while 
it filled. Young and old, well dressed and shabby, 
happy and unhappy — they filtered quickly in and 
took their seats, and sat, silent or chattering softly, 
waiting patiently till it was the hour for beginning ; 
and it was touching to see among them so many 
pale and wistful faces, so many that were lined with 
care and weariness, so many who were obviously 
poor and heavy laden. And when the first low 
notes began to breathe from the organ-loft a deep 
silence fell upon all the assembly, and looking over 
its sea of white, intent faces, the gauntest of them 
strangely softened already as under some magical 
dream-light, I could not help thinking, while the 
music gathered in fulness and majesty, of the foul 
slums and mean streets, the drab, cramped houses 
and close rooms, the broken hearts and broken lives 
that lay in the night all about this Palace — I could 



142 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

not help thinking of these things until the music 
seemed to be nothing but the voice of them all, 
weeping quietly, crying out in impotent grief and 
anger, throbbing with despair and regret, mellowing 
to a restful resignation, yet rising out of that, at 
last, to a passionate appeal which swelled and grew 
until it seemed to soar like a very fountain of prayer 
against the sin of this rich, Christian city in which 
there is so much selfish luxury and wrong, so much 
of penury and suffering and such foolish waste of 
life. 

Hearing this, and seeing that crowd, and seeing 
the work of the place on week-days, I feel that per- 
haps it was a finer and greater thing to have written 
All Sorts and Conditions of Men than to have been 
a rarer artist and have written immortal novels. 
To have created the People's Palace, to have lighted 
a torch in the darkness of the East End that shines 
like a morning star on the forehead of the new day, 
was no small achievement. The book will soon be 
old-fashioned and unreadable and so die, but its 
influence will outlast it, and will be stronger and 
more far-reaching than anyone can know. Therefore 
Besant becomes more than respectable, and some of 
the scenes that his fancy played with are shrines for 
the pilgrim. 

In Mile End Road are the Trinity Almshouses, 
built by the Corporation of Trinity House in 1695 
as a home of rest for master mariners, and their 
wives or widows ; to the Almshouses went Angela, 
the heroine of All Sorts and Conditions of Men, with 
Mr. Bunker, on a visit to old Captain Sorensen, and 
they remain much as Angela saw them : 



TO THE TOWER 143 

" She observed that she was standing at a wicket gate, 
and that over the gate was the effigy of a ship in full sail done 
in stone. Mr. Bunker opened the door, and led the way to 
the court within. Then a great stillness fell upon the girl's 
spirit. Outside the wagons, carts and omnibuses thundered 
and rolled. You could hear them plainly enough ; you could 
hear the tramp of a thousand feet. But the noise outside was 
only a contrast to the quiet within. A wall of brick with iron 
railings separated the tumult from the calm. It seemed as 
if, within that court, there was no noise at all, so sharp and 
sudden was the contrast. She stood in an oblong court, 
separated from the road by the wall above named. On either 
hand was a row of small houses containing, apparently, four 
rooms each. They were built of red brick, and were bright and 
clean. Every house had an iron tank in front for water ; there 
was a pavement of flags along this row, and a grass lawn 
occupied the middle of the court. Upon the grass stood the 
statue of a benefactor, and at the end of the court was a chapel. 
It was a very little chapel, but was approached by a most 
enormous and disproportionate flight of stone steps, which 
might have been originally cut for the portal of St. Paul's 
Cathedral. The steps were surmounted by a great doorway, 
which occupied the whole west front of the chapel. No one 
was moving about the place except an old lady, who was 
drawing water from her tank. 

" ' Pretty place, ain't it ? ' asked Mr. Bunker. 

" ' It seems peaceful and quiet,' said the girl. . . . 

" He led the way, making a most impertinent echo with the 
heels of his boots. Angela observed immediately that there 
was another court beyond the first. In fact it was larger ; 
the houses were of stone, and of greater size ; and it was if 
anything more solemnly quiet. It was possessed of silence. 
Here there is another statue erected to the memory of the 
Founder, who, it is stated on the pedestal, died, being then 
* Commander of a Shipp ' in the East Indes, in the year 1686. 
The gallant captain is represented in the costume of the period. 
He wears a coat with many buttons, large cuffs, and full skirts ; 
the coat is buttoned a good way below the waist, showing the 



144 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

fair doublet within, also provided with many buttons. He 
wears shoes with buckles, has a soft silk wrapper round his 
neck, and a sash to carry his sword. On his head there is an 
enormous wig, well adapted to serve the purpose for which 
Solar Topees were afterwards invented. In his right hand he 
carries a sextant, many sizes bigger than those in modern use, 
and at his feet dolphins sport. A grass lawn covers this court, 
as well as the other, and no voice or sound ever comes from 
any of the houses, whose occupants might well be all dead. 

" Mr. Bunker turned to the right, and presently rapped with 
his knuckles at a door. Then, without waiting for a reply, he 
turned the handle, and with a nod invited his companion to 
follow him. It was a small but well-proportioned room, with 
low ceiling, furnished sufficiently. There were clean white 
curtains with rose-coloured ribbons. The window was open, 
and in it stood a pot of mignonette, now at its best. At the 
window sat, on one side, an old gentleman with silvery white 
hair and spectacles, who was reading, and on the other side 
a girl, with work on her lap, was sewing." 

Angela had come to announce that she had taken 
one of Mr. Bunker's houses on Stepney Green, and 
was, as Mr. Bunker put it, " setting herself up, in a 
genteel way, in the dressmaking line," and, want- 
ing hands to start with, proposed to engage this 
girl, Captain Sorensen's daughter, as one of her 
employees. 

It is not far from the Trinity Almshouses to 
Stepney Green, and facing Stepney Green you may 
see what used to be Mrs. Bormalack's boarding- 
house, where Angela lodged, with that spirited, 
democratic young man, Harry Goslett, whom she 
was ultimately to marry, among the boarders. 

" From Stepney Green to the Trinity Almshouse is not a long 
way ; you have, in fact, little more than to pass through a 
short street and to cross the road. But the road itself is note- 




}Iollamd Sr/zssr 

f)LACfCFJZ/A^S . 
fred^dcock, . 

" Then at the end of Bankside they turn off into Holland Street." 
Besant. " The Bell of St. Pauls " Chapter S 



TO THE TOWER 145 

worthy ; for of all the roads which lead into London or out of 
it, this of Whitechapel is the broadest and the noblest by- 
nature. Man, it is true, has done little to embellish it. There 
are no avenues of green and spreading lime trees as, one day, 
there shall be ; there are no stately buildings, towers, spires, 
miracles of architecture ; but only houses and shops which, 
whether small or big, are all alike mean, unlovely and depressing. 
Yet, in spite of all, a noble road." 

The lime trees are there now ; otherwise the road 
is very much as it was then. Cross it, and go through 
the short street, and you are on Stepney Green, 
passing Mrs. Bormalack's boarding-house. The 
Green is " a small strip of Eden which has been 
visited by few indeed of those who do not live in 
its immediate vicinity/ ' 

" The house was old, built of red bricks with a ' shell ' 
decoration over the door. It contained room for about eight 
boarders, who had one sitting room in common. . . . There 
are not many places in London where sunset does produce such 
good effects as at Stepney Green. The narrow strip, so called, 
in shape resembles too nearly a closed umbrella or a thickish 
walking-stick; but there are trees in it, and beds of flowers, and 
seats for those who wish to sit, and walks for those who wish to 
walk. And the better houses of the Green — Bormalack's 
was on the west or dingy side— are on the east, and face the 
setting sun. They are of a good age, at least a hundred and 
fifty years old ; they are built of warm red brick, and some 
have doors ornamented with the old-fashioned shell, and all 
have an appearance of solid respectability, which makes the 
rest of Stepney proud of them. Here, in former days, dwelt the 
aristocracy of the parish ; and on this side was the house taken 
by Angela for her dressmaking institution, the house in which 
her grandfather was born. The reason why the sunsets are 
more splendid and the sunrises brighter at Stepney than at 
the opposite end of the town is that the sun sets behind the 
great bank of cloud which for ever lies over London town. 

10 



146 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Now, when he rises it is naturally in the East, where there is 
no cloud of smoke to hide the brightness of his face. 

" The Green this evening was crowded : it is not so fashion- 
able a promenade as Whitechapel Road, but, on the other 
hand, it possesses the charm of comparative quiet. There is 
no noise of vehicles, but only the shouting of children, the 
loud laughter of some gaillard 'prentice, the coy giggle of the 
young lady to whom he has imparted his latest merry jape, the 
loud whispers of ladies who are exchanging confidences about 
their complaints and the complaints of their friends, and the 
musical laugh of girls. The old people had all crept home; 
the mothers were at home putting their children to bed ; the 
fathers were mostly engaged with the evening pipe, which 
demands a chair within four walls and a glass of something ; 
the Green was given up to youth ; and youth was principally 
given up to love-making." 

Angela and Harry Goslett walked on the Green ; 
they often walked on it together ; and here, and in 
two of the houses facing the Green — Mrs. Borma- 
lack's, and Angela's dressmaking establishment — 
Angela dreamed of building that Palace of Delight 
which was to provide the joyless multitude with 
libraries, reading rooms, clubs, music rooms, a school 
for music, and one for dancing, something, too, in 
the nature of a public school, with lecturers and 
professors — the very Palace that she built in the 
book and opened on the day of her wedding ; the 
very People's Palace that has since come into being 
on the Mile End Road. 

At Stepney Church, an old, fourteenth-century 
church in the High Street, Angela married Harry 
Goslett, and revealed to him, after the ceremony 
was over, when they met a large party of friends at 
her newly-erected Palace of Delight, that she was 



TO THE TOWER 147 

not Angela Kennedy, the mere dressmaker, but 
Angela Messenger, and the richest heiress in England. 
All about Bow Road, Mile End Road, Whitechapel 
Road, East India Dock Road, Limehouse Church, 
where Angela and Harry walked in the churchyard 
that is now a garden, Bethnal Green, Spitalfields 
— all about these and other thronged and squalid 
neighbourhoods of the East End, the people of All 
Sorts and Conditions of Men lived and worked and 
wandered, Angela sometimes, in Besant's favourite 
fashion, acting the cicerone and telling the others 
about the places they were passing through ; but 
we have no time to follow them further and must 
get back to the Minories, and so to the Tower of 
London. The Three Nuns Tavern, across the road 
in Aldgate, reminds us that all about the Minories 
here, six centuries ago, were the gardens belonging 
to an Abbey of nuns. Not a vestige of the gardens 
remains, and though a few of the byways are re- 
miniscent in their buildings, or their names and 
contour, of eighteenth and seventeenth century 
London, only one of them has any peculiar fasci- 
nation for me, and that is Goodman's Yard, which, 
in the main, is the most grossly modernised of them 
all. It is little more than a railway goods yard now, 
a huge, dull brick railway building on one side of it, 
and a row of mean little old houses and another old 
Ben Jonson tavern on the other. But it draws 
me to step aside into it because Stow used to come 
this way in the sixteenth century, and hereabouts 
was the stile he climbed to get into Goodman's field 
and go to Goodman's farm, where he would refresh 
himself with a ha'porth of milk before he turned 



148 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

to walk back home. At the end of the Minories, 
you are on Tower Hill, with the grey, grim, ancient 
Tower before you. 

Quilp lived on Tower Hill ; Mrs. Quilp had a view 
of the Tower from her front window ; and you may 
choose for yourself which of the queer, quaint old 
houses that still topple along the edge of that wide 
sweep before the Tower is likeliest to have been his. 
The unhappy Florrie Holford, of Besant's Bell of 
St. Paul's, came from her lodgings in Mansell Street 
in an hour of black despair, and flitting out by Thames 
Street, " crossed Tower Hill ; on her left rose up 
the great white Tower, now black in the night. . . . 
Beside the long Quay and Terrace of the Custom 
House, which at night is closed, there are stairs, 
broad stone stairs, with an iron railing running 
down them and a little stone landing place at the 
top ; you reach the stairs through iron gates in the 
Street. In the daytime there are boatmen hanging 
about ; survivors of the Thames watermen. By 
night there is no one. Great timber piles are stuck 
in the bed of the river just below these stairs, for 
the mooring of barges, and when the tide is going 
up or down the water rushes boiling, sucking, tear- 
ing at the timbers as if it would gladly pull them up 
and hurry them away far out to sea. Hither she 
came and here she stood looking into the water, 
while the voice tempted and urged her to plunge 
in and make an end. Only one little step : no more 
trouble : no more misery : no more tears : no more 
starvation, rags and shame. Just one step : the 
river, the rushing river, the kind and merciful river, 
the river of rest and sleep would do the rest. . . . 



TO THE TOWER 149 

No one was on the stairs : after dark no one ever 
is on those stairs ; she walked to the head of the 
steps, and caught the iron rail and looked over." 
But after a struggle with herself, she resisted the 
temptation, and coming back along Great Tower 
Hill, returned into Thames Street, and " went home 
crying." 

Just off Great Tower Hill, in the little public 
garden that fringes the outside edge of the moat, 
is the site of that scaffold on which so many great 
and famous rebels, traitors and good men, were 
brought to the block. " Upon this hill," says Stow, 
" is always readily prepared, at the charges of the 
city, a large scaffold and gallows of timber, for the 
execution of such traitors and transgressors as are 
delivered out of the Tower, or otherwise, to the 
sheriffs of London by writ, there to be executed." 
Near by the scaffold stood the stocks, and in the 
last scene of Ford's tragedy of Perkin Warbeck, a 
constable and officers, followed by a rabble, bring 
Warbeck on to Tower Hill and fasten him in the 
stocks. He is urged by the King's Chaplain to 
confess that he is an impostor, that he is not of royal 
blood and has no rightful claim to the crown, but 
this he refuses to do, even to save his life. Pre- 
sently, his wife, Lady Katherine, comes to him there 
with her attendants, and rebukes the Earl of Oxford, 
who would dissuade her from publicly acknowledging 
Her degraded husband : 

Katherine. Forbear me, sir, 
And trouble not the current of my duty ! — 
Oh, my lov'd lord ! can any scorn be yours 
In which I have no interest ? some kind hand 



150 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Lend me assistance, that I may partake 
Th' infliction of this penance. My life's dearest, 
Forgive me ; I have staid too long from tend'ring 
Attendance on reproach, yet bid me welcome. 

Warbeck. Great miracle of constancy ! my miseries 
Were never bankrupt of their confidence 
In worst afflictions, till this — now I feel them. 
Report, and thy deserts, thou best of creatures, 
Might to eternity have stood a pattern 
For every virtuous wife, without this conquest, 
Thou hast outdone belief ; yet may their ruin 
In after marriages be never pitied 
To whom the story shall appear a fable ! 
Why would'st thou prove so much unkind to greatness, 
To glorify thy vows by such a servitude ? 
I cannot weep ; but, trust me, dear, my heart 
Is liberal of passion ; Harry Richmond, 
A woman's faith hath robb'd thy fame of triumph ! 

Later, the sheriff and his officers arrive bringing 
four of Warbeck's followers, with halters about 
their necks, but by then he has been taken from 
the stocks and is being led away himself to execution : 

Oxford. Look ye, behold your followers, appointed 
To wait on you in death. 

Warbeck. Why, peers of England, 

We'll lead them on courageously ; I read 
A triumph over tyranny upon 
Their several foreheads . . . 
Death ! pish ! 'tis but a sound, a name of air ; 
A minute's storm, or not so much ; to tumble 
From bed to bed, be massacred alive 
By some physicians, for a month or two, 
In hope of freedom from a fever's torments, 
Might stagger manhood ; here the pain is past 
Ere sensibly 'tis felt. Be men of spirit ! 



TO THE TOWER 151 

Spurn coward passion ! so illustrious mention 
Shall blaze our names, and style us Kings o'er death. 

Finally enters King Henry VII. to say the word 
that dismisses Warbeck to his doom. Harrison 
Ainsworth has a scene or two on Tower Hill, and 
his novel, The Tower of London, takes you all over 
the Tower itself, but most of his characters are the 
actual people of history, and those that are not are 
too unreal and make too faint an appeal to the 
imagination to add anything to the life or interest 
of the Tower. Perkin Warbeck was actual enough, 
of course, but Ford recreates him and makes him 
his own, and it is because Ainsworth could never 
do this that I have no clear recollection of his char- 
acters, and no inclination to re-read his books and 
renew my memories of the men and women of his 
tales. Perhaps it is impossible for fiction to add 
anything to the pathos, terror, tragedy and glamorous 
romance of real life that make the Tower the most 
ghastly, the most fascinating, the most precious 
of all the relics we have of bygone London. William 
the Conqueror is known to have built the beginnings 
of it as a menace to any rebellious spirit that might 
waken against him among the Londoners, but there 
is sufficient justification for Shakespeare's account 
of its origin, which is usually listed with his inac- 
curacies. In Richard III., when Gloucester pro- 
poses to Edward, the young Prince of Wales, that 
" your highness shall repose you at the Tower," 
the Prince remarks, 

I do not like the Tower, of any place ; 

Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord ? 



152 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

and Buckingham replies, 

He did, my gracious lord, begin that place, 
Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified, 

the fact being that the Romans had a fort on the 
same site and, doubtless, when the Conqueror com- 
menced building there he utilised what was left of 
it. Which was evidently Gray's idea, too, when 
he wrote, in The Bard : 

Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame, 
With many a foul and midnight murder fed ! 

So you may take it that the Tower has watched over 
the city since the days when London was nothing 
more than a collection of huts on the banks of the 
Thames. In its present aspect it has been a familiar 
landmark, watching over London, for six hundred 
years. Since the huddled streets and alleys, the 
beautiful palaces, the gardens and pleasant old 
houses of the middle-ages lay stretched before it, 
it has seen London shifting and changing, like the 
figures in a kaleidoscope, through Tudor, Stuart, 
Georgian, Victorian times, to the vast, unpicturesque 
but statelier city of to-day. It saw the streets in 
uproar during many a wild outbreak of the 'pren- 
tices ; and when Jack Cade, and when Wat Tyler 
brought their conquering rabble swarming into 
them over the bridges ; and when the Gordon 
rioters went roaring about them, burning and pil- 
laging. It has seen the city glittering with number- 
less royal and civic processions ; it has seen it 
desolated by the Great Plague, and swept by the 
Great Fire, All the wonderful, multi-coloured 



TO THE TOWER 153 

history of London has unrolled itself round the grim 
walls of the Tower, and some of the blackest, most 
memorable events of it have happened within them. 
For, to say nothing of the sad multitude of its lesser 
victims, it has held in its cells and dungeons famous 
men such as Raleigh, Lord William Russell, the 
Earl of Essex, Sir Thomas More ; Lord Nithsdale 
escaped from it ; the little Princes were murdered 
in the Bloody Tower ; from a window over the 
gateway of the Bloody Tower Archbishop Laud 
leaned to bless Earl Strafford as he passed below on 
his way to execution ; in the same Tower the brutal 
Judge Jeffries was imprisoned ; in its Bowyer Tower 
the Duke of Clarence was drowned in a butt of 
malmsey ; and it has numbered Henry VI. , Anne 
Boleyn, Queen Katherine and Lady Jane Grey 
among its royal prisoners ; the Duke of Monmouth 
lay waiting execution in the White Tower, in the 
dungeons under which the Guy Fawkes conspirators 
were horribly tortured with the thumbscrews and 
the rack before they passed out to the scaffold. 
Those three Queens were beheaded on the scaffold 
within the Tower, the site of which is marked against 
the chapel of St. Peter ; it was on the scaffold out- 
side on Tower Hill that Sir Thomas More went to 
his death, and Strafford, Laud, Monmouth, Lord 
Lovat, and many another to theirs. 

With all this and so much more of reality in mind, 
one cannot make much of the large part that the 
Tower has played in fiction, and I shall linger only 
over a few such scenes that come readiest to my 
recollection. Nigel, Lord Glenvarloch, in Scott's 
Fortunes of Nigel, was rowed up the river to the 



154 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

broad steps of the Traitor's Gate and carried a 
prisoner into the Tower. He was shut in the same 
cell that had held Lady Jane Grey, in the Beauchamp 
Tower, and amused himself for a while in decipher- 
ing " the names, mottoes, verses and hieroglyphics 
with which his predecessors in captivity had covered 
the walls of their prison-house : 

" There he saw the names of many a forgotten sufferer 
mingled with others which will continue in remembrance until 
English history shall perish. There were the pious effusions 
of the devout Catholic, poured forth on the eve of his sealing 
his profession at Tyburn, mingled with those of the firm Pro- 
testant about to feed the fires of Smithfield. There the slender 
hand of the unfortunate Jane Grey, whose fate was to draw 
tears from future generations, might be contrasted with the 
bolder touch which impressed deep on the walls the Bear and 
Ragged Staff, the proud emblem of the proud Dudleys. It was 
like the roll of the prophet, a record of lamentation and mourn- 
ing, and yet not unmixed with brief interjections of resignation, 
and sentences expressive of the firmest resolution." 

You may enter the cell and read them for your- 
self, and I think they gain something of further 
interest, not from Nigel's association, but from the 
fact that Scott once stood here and read them, too, 
and went away to create Nigel and put him in this 
prison, and enact in it that scene with Master Heriot, 
the Lombard Street goldsmith, and the Fleet Street 
clockmaker's daughter, Margaret Ramsay. Loving 
Nigel in secret, she had followed him dressed as a 
page to warn him he was in danger of arrest, was 
captured and thrown into this same dungeon with 
him and lay exhausted on the floor with her cloak 
wrapped about her, till Master Heriot came and, 
snatching it away, revealed her identity and was 



TO THE TOWER 155 

with difficulty persuaded that Nigel had not until 
then been aware of it. 

Tom Taylor has a scene of his 'Twixt Axe and 
Crown, in the Lieutenant's Lodging in the Tower, 
and another, a better one, in the Lieutenant's Garden. 
Here Sir Thomas Wyatt, condemned for fomenting 
rebellion against Queen Mary on behalf of the Lady 
Elizabeth, is 

Brought round 
By the Byward Tower and Postern to Tower Hill, 

to pay the price of his treason. And again, in his 
historical drama of Anne Boleyn, Tom Taylor has 
his last scene in the Presence Chamber in the Tower, 
where Anne Boleyn bids farewell to her waiting- 
women and asks them to tell the King : 

For my death, 
I pray God pardon his great sin therein, 
And all my enemies, its instruments. 
And tell the King, too, he hath still been constant 
In heaping honours on this head of mine — 
From simple maid he made me Marchioness ; 
From state of Marchioness raised me to Queen ; 
And now he hath no higher earthly crown 
He crowns my innocence with martyrdom. . . . 
'Twas hence I set forth for my coronation ; 
All is as it was then — only a Queen 
Who goes to take a higher crown than England's. 

Two scenes of Ford's Perkin Warbeck are inside 
the Tower ; but no imaginative writer is so closely 
identified with it as Shakespeare. It is in Richard II. 
that you have Richard's Queen waiting with her 
Ladies in " a street leading to the Tower " to see 
the King, who has been deposed by Bolingbroke, 



156 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



go by 

says : 



on his road to prison. " This way," she 



This way the king will come ; this is the way 
To Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower, 
To whose flint bosom my condemned lord 
Is doomed a prisoner by proud Bolingbroke, 
Here let us rest, if this rebellious earth 
Have any resting for her true king's queen ; 

and here presently, under the walls of the Tower, 
she and Richard say a last farewell to each other. 
Into a room of the Tower, in Henry VI., Mortimer 
is carried by two of his gaolers, and begs them to 
set him down there : 

Kind keepers of my weak decaying age, 
Let dying Mortimer here rest himself, 
Even like a man new haled from the rack, 
So fare my limbs with long imprisonment ; 
And these grey locks, the pursivants of death, 
Nestor-like aged, in an age of care, 
Argue the end of Edmund Mortimer. 

He had conspired for the crown and failed, and so 
had spent most of his life uselessly in prison ; he 
has sent now for his nephew, Richard Plant agenet, 
who comes from the Temple to see him, is by him 
when he dies, and says his fitting epitaph over him : 

Here dies the dusky torch of Mortimer, 
Choked with ambition of the meaner sort. 

In the second part of the same play, you have the 
citizens gathered by the Tower, whilst Jack Cade's 
conquering mob overruns London, and Lord Scales 
appears on the walls to ask for news : 



TO THE TOWER 157 

Scales. How now ! Is Jack Cade slain ? 

First Citizen. No, my lord, nor likely to be slain ; for they 
have won the bridge, killing all those that withstand them. 
The Lord Mayor craves aid of your honour from the Tower, to 
defend the city from the rebels. 

Scales. Such aid as I can spare you shall command ; 
But I am troubled here with them myself ; 
The rebels have assayed to win the Tower. 
But get you to Smithfield and gather head, 
And thither I will send you Matthew Goffe : 
Fight for your king, your country, and your lives. 

But the play in which the Tower bulks largest is 
Richard III., with the great scene in which Clarence 
is stabbed and his body haled out to be flung into 
the malmsey-butt ; and that scene, as great and 
subtler, where Richard comes to join the Council 
sitting in the Tower, sends the Bishop of Ely away 
on a trivial errand — 

My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborn, 
I saw good strawberries in your garden there ; 
I do beseech you send for some of them,— 

and orders the sudden arrest of one of his opponents, 
Lord Hastings : 

Thou art a traitor : 
Off with his head ! Now, by Saint Paul, I swear, 
I will not dine until I see the same, 
Lovel and Ratcliff, look that it be done : 
The rest, that love me, rise, and follow me, 

and so leaves Hastings to lament his own lack of 
caution : 

Woe, woe, for England ! not a whit for me ; 
For I, too fond, might have prevented this. 



158 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Stanley did dream the boar did raze his helm ; 
And I did scorn it, and disdained to fly. 
Three times to-day my foot-cloth horse did stumble, 
And startled when he looked upon the Tower, 
As loath to bear me to the slaughter-house. . . . 

Ratdiff. Come, come, dispatch ; the duke would be 
at dinner : 
Make a short shrift, he longs to see your head. 

Hastings. momentary grace of mortal man, 
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God ! 

There is a scene on the Tower walls in which Glou- 
cester and Buckingham are scheming for the murder 
of the young princes who stand between Gloucester 
and the throne ; and a scene outside the Tower in 
which Queen Elizabeth, the mother of the princes, 
comes with others, bent upon seeing them and is 
refused admittance, and forced at last to go away 
full of forebodings : 

Stay yet, look back with me unto the Tower. 
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes 
Whom envy hath immured within your walls, 
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones ! 
Rude ragged nurse, old sullen playfellow 
For tender princes, use my babies well. 
So foolish sorrow bids your stones farewell. 

Surely, as Gray said, this Tower has been the 
shame of London, but Time lays such a magical, 
transforming hand on the sins and shames and bar- 
barisms of yesterday that it is now its glory too. 
The folly of those kings of ours was larger even than 
their crimes — that any one of them should think 
it worth while to waste his days in mean schemings 
to slaughter other kings and their children that he 
might wear a crown and carry a sceptre for such a 



TO THE TOWER 159 

very little while — the thing is too childish for any- 
thing but pity ; they were each so soon and so com- 
pletely done with it. They are all gone, and nothing 
abides with us but the story of their brutal littleness, 
and the shadow of the misery, the sufferings, the 
heart-break of their victims, which fills the grim 
old Tower for ever with a whisper of tears and sigh- 
ings, and clothes it with a furtive, sinister, haunted 
air, so that it is alienated from its human neigh- 
bourhood and looks strangely dark and cold even 
in the sunlight. 

It is pleasant, none the less, to think how Shake- 
speare must have walked through its gloomy chambers 
and up its narrow, twisted stairways, and how it 
must have lured nearly all our great English writers 
into visiting it, from Chaucer, who lived within 
sight of its gaunt walls, to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, 
Browning (who has a scene of Strafford in it), and 
Tennyson (who has talk of it in his Queen Mary) ; 
and that when you go in at the gate on Great Tower 
Hill you are treading in their footsteps. 



CHAPTER VII 

BY THE THAMES, AND UP THE MONUMENT 

I HAVE no interest in Tower Street, except to 
remember that " Simon Eyre, the mad shoemaker 
of Tower Street " lived there, and some of the scenes 
of Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday are laid in and 
about his shop ; and nothing need stay us in East- 
cheap till we come to the city end of it. Eastcheap, 
according to the invaluable Stow, " was always 
famous for its convivial doings. The cookes cried 
hot ribbes of beef roasted, pies well baked, and other 
victuals ; there was clattering of pewter pots, harps, 
pipe and sawtrie ; " and you find an echo of this 
in Dekker where, food running short at his banquet, 
Simon Eyre cries out to his assistants, " Firk, Hodge, 
lame Ralph, run, my tall men, beleaguer the shambles, 
beggar all Eastcheap, serve me whole oxen in 
chargers, and let sheep whine upon the tables like 
pigs for want of good fellows to eat them ! " Now- 
adays the street is a very modern business thorough- 
fare, and no more noticeably given over to the 
culinary graces than most of its neighbours. I 
like it partly because one day, about a century ago, 
Washington Irving walked along it as we are going 
now, and chiefly because the Boar's Head stood in 
Eastcheap and was kept by Mistress Quickly and 
frequented by Falstaff and his boon companions. 

160 






Vfs^B- 


\'-f p-' ?."*** 








^ -*?„=*• ^X^ 




" 4* VS 


" s >i- «-"'*- 



'Qlifford 's Jjhn- 



-*&. 



Mr. Boffin " glanced into the mouldy little plantation, or cat preserve of Clifford's 
Inn, as it was that day, in search of a suggestion." 

Chapter 10 



BY THE THAMES 161 

Washington Irving came to look for it, but it was 
swept away in the Great Fire, and he saw only the 
already ancient house that had succeeded to its site 
and was tenanted by an Irish hairdresser. We 
shall see less of it than that, for the end of East- 
cheap was cut away when King William Street was 
made, and the statue of that King, erected in the 
middle of the road, facing London Bridge, marks 
almost the exact spot where the Boar's Head used 
■to stand. Wherefore this is another statue I would 
have taken away to some equally unsuitable posi- 
tion, that it might be fittingly replaced by a statue 
of Falstaff, with a mighty pedestal that should carry 
a medallion portrait of Shakespeare and be panelled 
with some of those immortal scenes that had the 
Boar's Head for their background. It was there 
that Falstaff told and acted to the Prince and Poins 
the great story of his own Homeric righting, when 
he and Bardolph and Peto attacked the travellers 
on Gadshill ; it was thence that Falstaff set forth 
to take charge of his command of foot, and march 
with the Prince to put down rebellion — but I shall 
not attempt any dull catalogue of all Falstaff 's doings 
at the Boar's Head, his wit-combats with the Prince, 
his revellings with Bardolph, his dairyings with 
Doll Tearsheet, his quarrelings with Dame Quickly 
— all the life and talk and lusty humour that 
have made the inn as famous in its different fashion 
as the Cheapside Mermaid. If I were put to it to 
name the passage in Shakespeare that touches me 
most by its utter naturalness and the poignancy 
of its mingled pathos and humour I should name that 
which tells of the death of Falstaff. Like Falstaff 
ii 



162 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

himself it is one of the greatest things in all litera- 
ture, and makes me want to delay here and fancy 
the Boar's Head back into its place again and 
Bardolph, Nym and Ancient Pistol (now mine 
Hostess's husband) lingering on the footway before 
it, making ready to go and join the King's forces 
at Southampton with Mistress Quickly and the 
Boy, out there also, to see them start : 

Hostess. Prithee, honey-sweet husband, let me bring thee 
to Staines. 

Pistol. No ; for my manly heart doth yearn. Bardolph, 
be blithe ; Nym, rouse thy vaunting veins ; Boy, bristle thy 
courage up ; for Falstaff he is dead, and we must yearn 
therefore. 

Bardolph. Would I were with him, wheresome'er he is, 
either in heaven or hell ! 

Hostess. Nay, sure, he's not in hell : he's in Arthur's bosom, 
if ever man went to Arthur's bosom. A' made a finer end and 
went away an it had been any christon child ; a' parted even 
just between twelve and one, even at the turning o' the tide : 
for after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers 
and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way ; 
for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green 
fields. ' How now, Sir John ! ' quoth I : ' what man ! be of 
good cheer.' So a' cried out ' God, God, God,' three or four 
times : now I, to comfort him, bid him a' should not think of 
God, I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any 
such thoughts yet. So a' bade me lay more clothes on his feet : 
I put my hand into the bed and felt them, and they were as 
cold as any stone ; then I felt to his knees, and so upward, and 
upward, and all was as cold as any stone. 

Nym. They say he cried out of sack. 

Hostess. Ay, that a' did. 

Bardolph. And of women. 

Hostess. Nay, that a* did not. 



BY THE THAMES 163 

Boy. Yes, that a' did ; and said they were devils 
incarnate. 

Hostess. A' could never abide carnation ; 'twas a colour 
he never liked. 

Boy. A' said once, the devil would have him about women. 

Hostess. A' did in some sort handle women ; but then he 
was rheumatic, and talked of the whore of Babylon. 

Boy. Do you not remember a' saw a flea stick upon Bar- 
dolph's nose, and a' said it was a black soul burning in 
hell-fire ? 

Bardolph. Well, the fuel is gone that maintained that fire : 
that's all the riches I got in his service. 

Nym. Shall we shog ? the king will be gone from South- 
ampton. 

Pistol. Come, let's away. 

So they went, and are gone, and you look up, and 
see where they had stood, with the Boar's Head 
behind them, this unsatisfying statue of King 
William IV. 

A little way westward, up Cannon Street, is 
London Stone, another Shakespeare association, 
this time a still visible one. An old, old, worn block, 
it is shut, for protection against vandal hands, in 
a casing of stone, with iron bars across the front, 
against the wall of St. Swithin's church. It has 
been there since the time of the Romans, and is 
supposed to have been erected by them "as a 
miliary, like that in the Forum at Rome, from 
whence all the distances were measured.' ' The 
usual disputes are going on among antiquarians 
as to whether this was its purpose, but they do not 
concern us ; what does concern us is that Shake- 
speare placed hereabouts a brief scene of the fourth 
act of Henry VI. : 



164 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Scene VI. 

London. Cannon Street. 

Enter Jack Cade and his Followers. He strikes his staff on 

London Stone. 

Cade. Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting 
upon London Stone, I charge and command that, of the city's 
cost, the conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of 
our reign. And now, henceforward, it shall be treason for any 
that calls me other than Lord Mortimer. 

Enter a Soldier, running. 

Soldier. Jack Cade ! Jack Cade ! 

Cade. Knock him down there. [They kill him. 

Smith. If this fellow be wise, he'll never call you Jack Cade 
more ; I think he hath a very fair warning. 

Dick. My lord, there is an army gathered together in Smith- 
field. 

Cade. Come then, let's go fight with them. But first, go and 
set London bridge on fire, and, if you can, burn down the Tower 
too. Come, let's away. [Exeunt. 

Jack Cade was not that sort of man ; Shake- 
speare maligned him as all the historians used to ; 
but he had the warrant of Holinshed's Chronicle 
for making Cade strike London Stone and declare 
himself Lord of the City ; and whether, being roused 
by intolerable wrongs to lead the poor to fight for 
their bare rights, he was, in any case, a worse man 
than those kings who, in pursuit of their mean private 
ambitions, turned the Tower into a shambles, is a 
point that each of us can decide for himself. 

" Come, sergeant," says Philip, in Webster's 
Northward Ho ! when he is arrested in a tavern for 
debt, " I'll step to my uncle, not far off, in Pudding 
Lane, and he shall bail me." We are not going 
back to Pudding Lane for that or any other purpose, 



BY THE THAMES 165 

but it runs into Monument Yard, just out of East- 
cheap, and we are going back there for the sake of 
the Monument. The Great Fire broke out at the 
shop of the King's baker in Pudding Lane, and the 
Monument was built to commemorate it. Shift, 
the society entertainer of Foote's farce, The Minor, 
had an engagement at the house of an impossible 
" Mr. Deputy Sugarsops, near the Monument ; " 
and Todgers's Commercial Boarding House, whence 
Mr. Pecksniff lodged was in " a kind of paved yard 
near the Monument," but that yard and the houses 
in it were demolished a few years ago, though if you 
wander round by Love Lane and the adjacent by- 
ways you may still see houses that were coeval with 
Todgers's and as like it as if they belonged to the 
same family. But the Monument itself, as well 
as Todgers's, comes into Martin Chuzzlewit ; and 
the Monument is happily with us yet. 

When Tom Pinch came to London, he started 
out one morning to walk to Furnival's Inn ; with 
the countryman's distrust of Londoners, he would 
not ask to be directed, so lost his way and strayed 
off into Barbican, into London Wall, got somehow 
into Thames Street, and " found himself at last 
hard by the Monument. 

" The Man in the Monument was quite as mysterious a being 
to Tom as the Man in the Moon. It immediately occurred to 
him that the lonely creature who held himself aloof from all 
mankind in that pillar, like some old hermit, was the very man 
of whom to ask his way. Cold he might be ; little sympathy he 
had, perhaps, with human passion — the column seemed too 
tall for that ; but if Truth didn't live in the base of the Monu- 
ment, notwithstanding Pope'? couplet about the outside of it, 



166 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

where in London (Tom thought) was she likely to be found ! 
Coming close below the pillar, it was a great encouragement to 
Tom to find that the Man in the Monument had simple tastes ; 
that stony and artificial as his residence was, he still preserved 
some rustic recollections ; that he liked plants, hung up bird- 
cages, was not wholly cut off from fresh groundsel, and kept 
young trees in tubs. The Man in the Monument himself was 
sitting outside the door — his own door — the Monument door : 
what a grand idea ! — and was actually yawning, as if there were 
no Monument to stop his mouth and give him a perpetual 
interest in his own existence. 

" Tom was advancing towards this remarkable creature to 
inquire the way to Furnival's Inn, when two people came to see 
the Monument. They were a gentleman and a lady ; and the 
gentleman said, ' How much apiece ? ' 

" The Man in the Monument replied, ' A Tanner.' 

" It seemed a low expression, compared with the Monument. 
The gentleman put a shilling in his hand, and the Man in the 
Monument opened a dark little door. When the gentleman 
and lady had passed out of view, he shut it again, and came 
slowly back to his chair. He sat down and laughed. 

" ' They don't know what a-many steps there is ! ' he said. 
1 It's worth twice the money to stop here. Oh, my eye ! ' 

" The man in the Monument was a Cynic ; a worldly man ! 
Tom couldn't ask his way of Mm. He was prepared to put no 
confidence in anything he said. 

" ' My Gracious ! ' cried a well-known voice behind Mr 
Pinch. ' Why, to be sure it is ! ' 

" At the same time he was poked in the back by a parasol. 
Turning round to inquire into this salute, he beheld the eldest 
daughter of his late patron. 

" ' Miss Pecksniff ! ' said Tom. 

" ' Why, my Goodness, Mr Pinch ! ' cried Cherry. ' What 
are you doing here ? ' " 

Cherry and her sister, Mercy, had fallen out with 
Mr. Pecksniff, for the nonce, because they suspected 
him of designs to marry again ; the two of them 



BY THE THAMES 167 

were staying in London at Todgers's, and after some 
demur Tom consented to accompany her to the 
Boarding House and have a chat with her and her 
sister before he resumed his search for Furnival's Inn, 
which makes it all the more regrettable that Todgers's 
should have been wiped out of existence. 

Mr. Van den Bosch, grandfather of the pretty Lydia 
of The Virginians, had his house in Monument Yard ; 
and when David Copperfield returned to England 
after his three years of wandering abroad, he " landed 
in London on a wintry autumn evening. It was dark 
and raining, and I saw more fog and mud in a minute 
than I had seen in a year. I walked from the Custom 
House to the Monument before I found a coach ; " 
and as the coach took him on from the Monument 
he looked out of the window " and observed that an 
old house on Fish Street Hill, which had stood un- 
touched by the painter, carpenter or bricklayer for 
a century, had been pulled down in my absence." 
But I know of only one novel that takes you up the 
Monument and gives you a scene on the top of it. 
This is Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee. Luckworth 
Crewe is an energetic, ambitious young man of 
business ; he has been paying attentions to Nancy 
Lord, but Nancy too is ambitious and in no hurry to 
give herself to any man all for love, and has held him 
off discreetly. She had once taken a walk with him, 
and at length he reminds her that she had promised 
him another. He mentions that he recently took 
some friends up the Monument and St. Paul's ; she 
remarks that she has never seen the Monument, and 
is brought to consent to meet him next afternoon at 
the north end of London Bridge. They meet there, 



168 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

and after some talk he says he will take her to see 
his business premises in Farringdon Street. 

" ' We'll walk round when we've been up the Monument. 
You don't often go about the City, I daresay. Nothing doing, 
of course, on a Saturday afternoon.' 

" Nancy made him moderate his pace, which was too quick 
for her. . . . 

" ' I shall live in a big way,' Crewe continued, as they walked 
on towards Fish Street Hill. ' Not for the swagger of it ; I 
don't care about that, but because I've a taste for luxury. 
I shall have a country house, and keep good horses. And I 
should like to have a little farm of my own, a model farm ; 
make my own butter and cheese, and know that I ate the 
real thing. I shall buy pictures. Haven't I told you I like 
pictures ? Oh, yes. I shall go round among the artists, and 
encourage talent that hasn't made itself known.' 

" ' Can you recognise it ? ' asked Nancy. 

" ' Well, I shall learn to. And I shall have my wife's portrait 
painted by some first-rate chap, never mind what it costs, and 
hung in the Academy. That's a great idea of mine — to see 
my wife's portrait in the Academy. . . . Well, here we are. 
People used to be fond of going up there, they say, just to pitch 
themselves down. A good deal of needless trouble, it seems to 
me. Perhaps they gave themselves the off-chance of changing 
their minds before they got to the top.' 

" ' Or wanted to see if life looked any better from up there/ 
suggested Nancy. 

" * Or hoped somebody would catch them by the coat-tails, 
and settle a pension on them out of pity.' 

" Thus jesting they began the ascent. Crewe, whose spirits 
were at high pressure, talked all the way up the winding stairs ; 
on issuing into daylight, he became silent, and they stood side 
by side, mute, before the vision of London's immensity. Nancy 
began to move round the platform. The strong west wind 
lashed her cheeks to a glowing colour ; excitement added 
brilliancy to her eyes. As soon as they had recovered from the 
first impression, this spectacle of a world's wonder served only 



BY THE THAMES 169 

to exhilarate her ; she was not awed by what she looked upon. 
In her conceit of self-importance, she stood there, above the 
battling millions of men, proof against mystery and dread, 
untouched by the voices of the past, and in the present seeing 
only common things, though from an odd point of view. Here 
her senses seemed to make the literal assumption by which her 
mind had always been directed : that she — Nancy Lord — 
was the mid point of the universe. No humility awoke in her ; 
she felt the stirring of envies, avidities, unavowable passions, 
and let them flourish unrebuked. 

" Crewe had his eyes fixed upon her ; his lips parted hungrily. 

" ' Now that's how I should like to see you painted,' he 
said all at once. ' Just like that ! I never saw you looking so 
well. I believe you're the most beautiful girl to be found 
anywhere in this London.' 

" There was genuine emotion in his voice, and his sweeping 
gesture suited the mood of her vehemence. Nancy, having 
seen that the two or three other people on the platform were 
not within hearing, gave an answer of which the frankness 
surprised even herself. 

" ' Portraits for the Academy cost a good deal, you know.' 

" ' I know. But that's what I'm working for. There are 
not many men down yonder,' he pointed over the City, ' have 
a better head for money-making than I have.' 

" ' Well, prove it,' replied Nancy, and laughed as the wind 
caught her breath. 

" ' How long will you give me ? ' 

" She made no answer, but walked to the side whence she 
could look westward. Crewe followed close, his features set 
still in the hungry look, his eyes never moving from her warm 
cheek and full lips. 

" ' What it must be,' she said, ' to have twenty thousand 
a year ! ' 

" The man of business gave a gasp. In the same moment 
he had to clutch at his hat, lest it should be blown away. 

" ' Twenty thousand a year ? ' he echoed. ' Well, it isn't 
impossible. Men get beyond that, and a good deal beyond 
it. But it's a large order.' 



170 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

" ' Of course it is. But what was it you said ? The most 
beautiful girl in all London ? That's a large order, too, is'nt 
it ? How much is she worth ? ' 

" ' You're talking for the joke now/ said Crewe. ' I don't 
like to hear that kind of thing, either. You never think in 
that way.' 

" ' My thoughts are my own. I may think as I choose.' 

" ' Yes. But you have thoughts above money.' 

" ' Have I ? How kind of you to say so. — I've had enough 
of this wind ; we'll go down.' 

" She led the way, and neither of them spoke till they were 
in the street again. Nancy felt her hair. 

" ' Am I blown to pieces ? ' she asked. 

" ' No, no ; you're all right. Now, will you walk through 
the City ? ' 

" ' Where's the place you spoke of ? ' 

" ' Farringdon Street. That'll bring you round to Black- 
friars Bridge, when you want to go home. But there's plenty 
of time yet.' " 

Fish Street Hill slopes down into Lower Thames 
Street, and leftward lie Billingsgate Market, and be- 
yond it the Custom House, at which young Scatterall, 
in Trollope's Three Clerks, yearned to secure an 
appointment because " one does get such stunning 
feeds for tenpence at that place in Thames Street " — 
the Custom House from which David Copperfield 
walked to the Monument, and to the steps of which 
Cowper once went with the intention of committing 
suicide, but was baulked by the sight of a porter 
sitting on some goods there, and went back to the 
coach he had left at the eastern end of Thames Street, 
by Tower wharf. Billingsgate, as a synonym for bad 
language, has been strewn up and down English 
literature for centuries past. Morose, in Ben Jonson's 
Silent Woman, recalling the most unpleasant places 



m 



BY THE THAMES 171 

of his acquaintance, swears that if only it would 
enable him to get rid of his wife he would do penance 
" in a belfry, at Westminster Hall, the Tower wharf — 
what place is there else ? — London Bridge, Paris 
Garden, Billingsgate, when the noises are at their 
height, and loudest." Olivia, in Wycherley's Plain 
Dealer, speaking of the surly, honest, Manly, a sea- 
captain, cries scornfully, " Foh ! I hate a lover that 
smells like Thames Street." You see Major Dobbin 
at his father's warehouse down Thames Street, in 
Vanity Fair ; James Gann, of A Shabby-Genteel Story, 
married and set up housekeeping in the same street ; 
and it was on a Thames Street wharf that Walter 
Gay first met Florence Dombey. 

When Mr. Simon Tappertit, of Barnaby Rudge, called 
on Mr. Chester, at his chambers in the Temple, he 
was carrying a great lock which he was on his 
way to fit " on a ware'us door in Thames Street." 
Mrs. Nickleby lived in Thames Street, and Newman 
Noggs drove her and Kate Nickleby there in a coach 
when they first went to take possession of the house — 

" a large old dingy house in Thames Street, the door and 
windows of which were so bespattered with mud that it would 
appear to have been uninhabited for years. . . . Old and 
gloomy and black in truth it was, and sullen and dark were 
the rooms once so bustling with life and enterprise. There 
was a wharf behind, opening on the Thames. An empty 
dog-kennel, some bones of animals, fragments of iron hoops, 
and staves of old casks lay strewn about but no life was stirring 
there. It was a picture of cold, silent decay." 

In Thames Street, too, lived Mrs. Clennam, with 
Mr. Flintwich and his wife Affery, in "an old brick 
house, so dingy as to be almost black." Little Dorrit 



172 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

used to come along Thames Street to it, and Arthur 
Clennam, and the rascally Rigaud ; but it is no use 
looking for it ; it was a " debilitated old house," 
standing propped on huge crutches, and I need not 
remind you that it collapsed, into ruins before the 
story ended. Althea, of The Bell of St. Paul's, who 
had a passion for London's relics of the past and 
pandered to Besant's weakness for making certain of 
his novels very guide-booky, came over from Bankside 
one Saturday afternoon with Laurence Waller, bent 
on showing him round, " all through one afternoon, 
from west to east, from Puddle Dock to Tower Hill, 
from one end to the other of Thames Street. 

" It was an ambitious programme, because the history of 
London might almost be written in Thames Street alone. . . . 
One would rather walk down Thames Street than the High 
of Oxford, or the Cannebiere of Marseilles, or the Rue St. Honore. 
The modern warehouses are not in the least picturesque, yet 
the names which remain carry the memory back ; the suc- 
cession of churches, though broken here and there by the havoc 
of modern barbarians, marks the piety of London merchants ; 
the narrow courts still lead to the old stairs, and the two ancient 
ports of Queenhithe and Billingsgate can still be seen. . . . 

" ' You are going to teach me more history,' said Laurence. 
' Shall we become ghosts once more ? ' 

" ' If you like,' she replied. ' But there is a great deal more 
history here than I can teach you in a single afternoon. Come.' 

" Then she began to talk. London began in Thames Street, 
where two little hillocks with a brook between rose above the 
river, on either side a swamp. When the hillocks were quite 
built upon and still there was not room enough for the trade 
which continued to grow, they built a river wall and more houses 
behind it ; and then they constructed their two ports, and as 
they grew richer they began to build stately houses upon the 
river wall : at one end Baynard's Castle " (where Shakespeare 



BY THE THAMES 173 

puts one of the scenes of Richard III), " and at the other the 
Tower : in the midst Cold Harbour " (Middle ton has a scene 
of A Trick to Catch the Old One there) " and the King's Steelyard. 
Here lived the Hanse merchants : here were the Halls of the 
City Companies : in the streets leading up the hill at the back 
stood many a noble mansion in its courtyard, full of precious 
carvings, rich tapestry, and caskets from foreign parts : along 
the streets was a succession of noble churches, each with its 
monuments and tombs, its vaults and its churchyards filled 
with the bones of dead citizens." 

She showed Laurence the port of Queenhithe, 
" which still preserves its ancient form though the 
buildings round it are modern ; " and " when they 
were as yet no more than half way down the street . . . 
Althea stopped at the corner of a street leading north. 
A little way up the street was a church Tower set a 
little way back, and, projecting from its face, a great 
clock reaching halfway across the street, with a curious 
little figure upon it." This street must have been 
Garlick Hill, and the church St. James Garlickhithe, 
for it answers the description accurately, and the 
figure standing on its clock is that of the Apostle. 
Althea's Aunt Cornelia was pew-opener and caretaker 
at that church ; they went in and interrupted a 
quarrel Aunt Cornelia was having with her assistant, 
and spent so much time in going over the building 
with them and seeing its curiosities, that they came 
out disinclined to walk any further that day in Thames 
Street. 

Near by is Paul's Wharf, and against Paul's Wharf 
the hero of The Fortunes of Nigel lodged with John 
Christie, the ship-chandler, at the end of a narrow lane 
in a house that looked out upon the river. But after 



174 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

all, if I am to confess the truth, the chief charm of 
Thames Street centres, not in any of these imaginary 
people, but in two men who once walked it in the flesh. 
Chaucer, whose pen " moved over bills of lading " 
on one of the busy wharves hereabouts, is said to 
have been born in Thames Street, by Dowgate Hill, 
and in or near Dowgate Robert Greene, from whom 
Shakespeare took some of his plots, spent his latter 
days and died, and few stories in the history of English 
literature are more tragically pathetic than that of 
Greene's death. He lay miserably penniless, ill and 
dying at the house of a poor shoemaker there ; he 
gave his host some sort of promissory note for ten 
pounds that he owed him and wrote under it an appeal 
to the wife he had forsaken : " Doll, I charge thee by 
the love of our youth and my soul's rest, that thou 
wilt see this man paide ; for if hee and his wife had 
not succoured me, I had died in the streetes." It 
was false sentiment, I know, yet there is something 
oddly touching in the record that his kindly hostess 
" crowned his dead body with a garland of bays," 
even though it is said that he had asked her to pay 
this honour to his remains. 



CHAPTER VIII 

SOUTH OF THE THAMES 

IT would be easy to say hard things about South 
London : about the slums and squalor of South- 
wark, Bermondsey and Lambeth ; the drab monotony 
of the streets of Battersea and Kennington ; the smug 
respectability and petty suburban spirit that preside 
over Brixton and Clapham ; the arcadian affectations 
of Tooting and Streatham. All this and more to the 
same purpose has been said often enough, but it is 
nqt all the truth, nor even all true. Snobs gravitate 
towards the snob ; unto the dull all things are dull, 
except their own doings, every place dull that does 
not live the little life that pleases them ; and the 
suburban-minded find or make a suburb wherever 
they go. Each of us, Atlas-like, carries his own 
world about with him, and to the man who carries a 
world that is large enough, and full enough, no suburb 
is ever suburban, the dullest place is alive with interest, 
and snobbery either does not exist, or exists simply 
for his private amusement. Good things come out 
of Nazareth, and there are plenty of good things in 
it, if you have eyes to see them ; otherwise Swinburne 
could not have lived most of his days at Putney, and 
Blake could not have strolled on Peckham Rye and 
seen angels in the trees there. 

Go over any one of the Bridges, and you cannot 

175 



* 176 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

set foot in the unloveliest district on the southern 
side of the Thames without straightway stepping into 
glamorous realms of romance ; in fact, romance will 
come out from it to meet you before you are half over 
the Bridge. 

Nancy Lord and Laurence Crewe, of Gissing's In 
the Year of Jubilee, met at the City end of London 
Bridge and, before they went on to the Monument, 
lingered leaning over the parapet, among the crowd 
that is nearly always leaning over it, looking down on 
the shipping, the vessels loading or unloading at the 
wharves, the pleasure steamers leaving or coming in 
at the Old Swan Pier. Once upon a time, you may 
learn from Our Mutual Friend, " a boat of dirty and 
disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated 
on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge, which is 
of iron, and London Bridge, which is of stone, as an 
autumn evening was closing in. The figures in this 
boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled 
hair and a sunbrowned face, and a dark girl of 
nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recog- 
nisable as his daughter.' ' These were Lizzie Hexam 
and her father, Rogue Riderhood ; she was rowing, 
and he watching the water on the chance of picking up 
a drowned body and securing a reward for it. Up 
and down the Thames between this and Rotherithe 
and Limehouse, past wharves and warehouses, moored 
ships and barges, and the crazy, toppling old inns and 
huts and frowsy residences that line the two muddy 
banks of the river, was his regular nightly beat on 
that gruesome search. Little Dorrit, when she lodged 
with her father in the Marshalsea, used to come over 
London Bridge to her sewing-work at Mrs. Clennam's 



led IDC 




',■ ; Lincoln's Inn (jat<£WA)> 

£NANC£Ry L/IN£ ■ 
fred K yidcoclc 

" We passed into sudden quietude under an old gateway " so Esther, in " Bleak 
House" describes her arrival here in a cab along Chancery Lane. 

Chapter 10 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 177 

in Thames Street, and went home that way warily, 
for fear anyone should follow her and discover where 
she lived : " This was the life and this the history of 
Little Dorrit ; turning at the end of London Bridge, 
recrossing it, going back again, passing on to St. 
George's Church, turning back suddenly once more, 
and flitting in at the open gate and little courtyard 
of the Marshalsea." 

David Copperfield passed, with Mr. Mell, over 
London Bridge on his way to Mr. Creakle's school. 
In one of the Sketches by Boz Dickens describes how 
the steamers start from the Old Swan Pier on the run 
to Gravesend and Margate ; and in another he tells 
you how the Tuggs's, who kept a grocer's shop, " in 
a narrow street on the Surrey side of the water within 
three minutes walk of the old London Bridge," made 
the voyage to Ramsgate to celebrate their coming 
into an inheritance of twenty thousand pounds. 
London Bridge is the scene, too, of a memorable 
chapter of Oliver Twist. Nancy came here one mid- 
night, shadowed by the disguised Noah Claypole, 
whom Fagin had set to spy upon her, to meet Mr. 
Browlow and Rose Maylie and disclose to them, in 
the interests of Oliver, some of the secrets of her 
associates : 

" The church clocks chimed three quarters past eleven, as 
two figures emerged on London Bridge. One, which advanced 
with a swift and rapid step, was that of a woman, who looked 
eagerly about her as though in quest of some expected object ; 
the other figure was that of a man, who slunk along in the 
deepest shadow he could find, and at some distance, accommo- 
dating his pace to hers. . . . Thus they crossed the Bridge from 
Middlesex to the Surrey shore : when the woman, apparently 

12 



178 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

disappointed in her anxious scrutiny of the foot-passengers, 
turned back. The movement was sudden ; but he who watched 
her was not thrown off his guard by it ; for shrinking into one 
of the recesses which surmount the piers of the Bridge, and 
leaning over the parapet the better to conceal his figure, he 
suffered her to pass by on the opposite pavement. ... It 
was a very dark night. ... A mist hung over the river, deepen- 
ing the red glare of the fires that burnt upon the small craft 
moored off the different wharves, and rendering darker and 
more indistinct the mirkier buildings on the banks. The old 
smoke-stained storehouses on either side rose heavy and dull 
from the dense mass of roofs and gables and frowned sternly 
upon water too black to reflect even their lumbering shapes. 
The tower of old St. Saviour's Church, and the spire of Saint 
Magnus, so long the giant warders of the ancient bridge, were 
visible in the gloom ; but the forest of shipping below bridge, 
and the thickly scattered spires of churches above, were nearly 
all hidden in the night. The girl had taken a few restless turns 
to and fro — closely watched meanwhile by her hidden observer 
— when the heavy bell of St. Paul's tolled for the death of 
another day. Midnight had come upon the crowded city. . . . 
The hour had not struck two minutes when a young lady, 
accompanied by a grey-haired gentleman, alighted from a 
hackney carriage within a short distance of the bridge and, 
having dismissed the vehicle, walked straight towards it. 
They had scarcely set foot upon its pavement when the girl 
started, and immediately made towards them. They walked 
onward, looking about them with the air of persons who enter- 
tained some very slight expectation which had little chance 
of being realised, when they were suddenly joined by this 
new associate. They halted with an exclamation of surprise, 
but suppressed it immediately ; for a man in the garments of 
a countryman came close up — brushed against them, indeed — 
at that precise moment. 

" ' Not here,' said Nancy hurriedly, c I'm afraid to speak to 
you here. Come away — out of the public road — down the 
steps yonder ! ' 

" As she uttered these words and indicated, with her hand, 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 179 

the direction in which she wished them to proceed, the country- 
man looked round, and roughly asking what they took up the 
whole pavement for, passed on. The steps to which the girl 
had pointed were those which, on the Surrey bank and on 
the same side of the bridge as Saint Saviour's Church, form 
a landing-stairs from the river. To this spot the man bearing 
the appearance of a countryman hastened unobserved ; and 
after a moment's survey of the place he began to descend. 
These stairs are a part of the bridge ; they consist of three 
flights. Just below the end of the second, going down, the 
stone wall on the left terminates in an ornamental pilaster 
facing towards the Thames. At this point the lower steps 
widen : so that a person turning that angle of the wall is 
necessarily unseen by any others on the stairs who chance to 
be above him, if only a step. The countryman looked hastily 
round when he reached this point ; and as there seemed no 
better place of concealment and, the tide being out, there was 
plenty of room, he slipped aside, with his back to the pilaster, 
and there waited." 

Nancy, Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie presently 
came down the steps, and paused here, beyond hear- 
ing from above, whilst Nancy made her disclosures ; 
Noah Claypole, crouched behind the pilaster, over- 
heard, and when they had gone, Rose and Mr. 
Brownlow first, and Nancy after an interval, he 
hurried back to Fagin with his report. Sikes being 
told, believed she had betrayed the whole gang, and 
in the madness of his rage, murdered Nancy and fled. 

If you cross the road to the eastern side of the 
bridge and look down on Rotherithe, over the 
parapet, you may see Jacob's Island with the grimy, 
ancient house upon it to which Sikes came when the 
police were hot on his track, and from the roof of 
which, while the mob was helping the officers to 
batter in the door and capture him, Sikes, planning 



180 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

desperately to escape by lowering himself behind the 
house into the deserted ditch which the incoming 
tide was filling, slipped and fell, and, the noose in the 
rope catching round his neck, was hanged. On a 
certain dark f night, Barnaby Rudge's villainous father 
" crossed London Bridge and passed into Southwark," 
where, in a bye-street he came upon the unhappy 
wife who lived in fear of his finding her, furtively 
tracked her to her home ; and having terrified her 
with threats and got food and money from her, came 
gliding back across the bridge and " plunged into the 
backways, lanes and courts between Cornhill and 
Smithfield." 

Immediately you are well over the Bridge, you have 
on the left London Bridge Station, to which Pendennis, 
Warrington and Fred Bayham went one morning " at 
an early hour proposing to breathe the fresh air of 
Greenwich Park before dinner. And at London 
Bridge, by the most singular coincidence, Lady Kew's 
carriage drove up to the Brighton entrance, and Miss 
Ethel and her maid stepped out of the brougham." 
On the right, facing the railway-station approach, is 
St. Saviour's, Southwark, lately renamed, and now 
known as Southwark Cathedral. Shakespeare's 
brother, Edmund, Fletcher, the dramatist, and 
Massinger are buried in it, but their graves are not 
marked, and the most interesting of its many ancient 
tombs is that of Chaucer's contemporary, Gower, with 
a painted effigy of the poet lying upon it, his head 
pillowed on his books. Behind Southwark Cathedral 
is a wide, long tract known as Bankside ; it stretches 
as far as to Southwark Bridge, and beyond that 
nearly to Westminster. On the part between London 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 181 

and Southwark Bridges stood the Globe Theatre, 
where Shakespeare's and Ben Jonson's plays were 
produced and Shakespeare was actor-manager. The 
site of it is occupied now by Barclay and Perkins's 
Brewery, and Barclay and Perkins were successors to 
that Mr. Thrale who was the friend of Dr. Johnson. 

But we keep straight on down the Borough High 
Street, and in due course come to a remnant of Lant 
Street, where Dickens lodged when he was a boy, 
whilst his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea 
and where, if you have read Pickwick, you know 
that Bob Sawyer, that dashing medical student, had 
apartments : 

" There is a repose about Lant Street, in the Borough, which 
sheds a gentle melancholy upon the soul. There are always 
a good many houses to let in the street ; it is a bye-street, too, 
and its dulness is soothing. ... If a man wished to abstract 
himself from the world ; to remove himself from within the 
reach of temptation ; to place himself beyond the possibility 
of any inducement to look out of the window, we should recom- 
mend him by all means to go to Lant Street. . . . The chief 
features in the still life of the street are green shutters, lodging- 
bills, brass door-plates and bell-handles. . . . The population 
is migratory, usually disappearing on the verge of quarter-day, 
and generally by night." 

The house where Dickens lodged, and where Bob 
Sawyer was living when he gave his famous party, is 
gone ; the street is " near to Guy's," said Mr. Sawyer, 
■' and handy for me, you know." And close by, in 
St. Thomas Street, is Guy's, which Keats walked 
when he was studying surgery. 

The most famous of the many Inns in the Boro' 
High Street is the Tabard, which has inherited the 
site of that Inn from which the pilgrims used to set 



182 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

out on their journeys to Canterbury, as they set out 
from it one April day in the fourteenth century when 
Chaucer was one of them : 

Byfel that, in that season on a day, 
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay, 
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage 
To Canterbury with ful devout corage, 
At night was come into that hostelrie 
Wei nyne and twenty in a companye, 
Of sondry folk, by aventure i-falle 
In felawschipe, and pilgryms were they alle, 
That toward Canturbury wolden ryde. 

He introduces us to all the company, and they have 
been riding to Canterbury ever since ; and as surely 
as Chaucer was the father of English poetry, that 
immortal Inn was its birthplace. 

Shakespeare has a scene of Henry VI in Southwark, 
where Cade and his rebels parley with Buckingham 
and the King's forces ; and at another Inn, the White 
Hart, there, whose yard still remains, Jack Cade 
took up his head-quarters. The Inn is replaced by 
an ugly building which appropriately houses " The 
Sam Weller Social Club " for it was in the yard of 
the White Hart that Mr. Pickwick first encountered 
Sam Weller : 

" There are in London several old inns, once the headquarters 
of celebrated coaches in the days when coaches performed their 
journeys in a graver and more solemn manner than they do 
in these times ; but which have degenerated into little more 
than the abiding and booking places of country wagons. . . . 
In the Borough especially, there still remain some half dozen 
old inns which have preserved their external features un- 
changed. ... It was in the yard of one of these inns — of no 
less celebrated a one than the White Hart — that a man was 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 183 

busily employed in brushing the dirt off a pair of boots. . . . 
He was habited in a coarse-striped waistcoat with black calico 
sleeves and blue glass buttons ; drab breeches and leggings. 
A bright red handkerchief was wound in a very loose and un- 
studied style round his neck, and an old white hat was care- 
lessly thrown on one side of his head. There were two rows of 
boots before him, one cleaned and the other dirty, and at every 
addition he made to the clean row he paused from his work, 
and contemplated its results with evident satisfaction." 

This was Sam Weller, and thus Mr. Pickwick, 
Mr. Wardle and Mr. Perker found him. They arrived 
in pursuit of Mr. Jingle who had eloped with Rachel 
Wardle, and the runaways were staying at the White 
Hart, Mr. Jingle being, at that moment, on his way 
back there from Doctor's Commons with a special 
licence in his pocket. If you step aside up George 
Yard, which is next to White Hart Yard, you may 
see the Old George Inn which with its low ceilings, 
ancient rafters and old wooden galleries outside closely 
resembles what the White Hart used to be and gives 
you an idea of the old Inn yards in which the strolling 
players of Shakespeare's time used to set up their 
stages. 

Over the road, from the White Hart, stood the 
King's Bench Prison, to which the officers brought 
Mr. Micawber from Windsor Terrace ; but a more 
famous debtor's prison, the Marshalsea, stood farther 
down the High Street, on the left, its side windows 
overlooking the churchyard of St. George's, which 
thrusts itself out from the level of the houses here 
and bars half the roadway. Dickens's father was 
imprisoned in the Marshalsea, and Dickens as a boy 
came often down from his lodging in Lant Street and 



184 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 






was in and out visiting him. But the Marshalsea is 
famous chiefly because its shadow overlies all the 
story of Little Dorrit. The place might almost be 
rebuilt from Dickens's descriptions, but there is no 
use in repeating them for it is all gone — or nearly all. 
Several years ago I went up Angel Court, which opens 
from the Borough High Street a little before you 
get to the church, and saw the last fragments that 
Dickens tells you, in a preface dated May 1857, were 
all that remained of the Marshalsea in his latter days : 

" Some of my readers may have an interest in being informed 
whether or no any portions of the Marshalsea Prison are yet 
standing. I did not know myself until the sixth of this present 
month, when I went to look. I found the outer front court- 
yard, often mentioned in this story, metamorphosed into a 
butter-shop ; and I then almost gave up every brick of the 
jail for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent 
' Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,' I came to Marshalsea 
Place ; the houses in which I recognised not only as the great 
block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that 
arose in my mind's eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer. 
The smallest boy I ever conversed with, carrying the largest 
baby I ever saw, offered a supernaturally intelligent explanation 
of the locality in its old uses, and was very nearly correct. . . . 
I pointed to the room where Little Dorrit was born, and where 
her father lived so long, and asked him what was the name of 
the lodger who tenanted that apartment at present ? He said 
1 Tom Py thick.' I asked him who was Tom Py thick ? and 
he said, ' Joe Py thick's uncle.' A little further on I found the 
older and smaller wall which used to enclose the pent-up inner 
prison where nobody was put except for ceremony. But, 
whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel 
Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very 
paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail ; will see its narrow 
yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, 
except that the walls were lowered when the place got free ; 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 185 

will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived, and will 
stand among the crowding ghosts of many miserable years." 

Angel Court is still there ; it no longer leads to 
Bermondsey, for it has been cut short and blocked 
in, but it still keeps a few of those sad old houses 
that Dickens identified. 

If the Marshalsea with all its memories of Little 
Dorrit and her family, and of Arthur Clennam, 
Plornish, Mr. Panks, and the rest of those who visited 
them there, is vanished, St. George's Church survives 
unaltered ; it is much as it was in the eighteenth 
century when young William Halliday of Besant's 
Orange Girl, cast off by his family, was its organist ; 
and you must not pass it without going in and seeing 
the vestry. There was a night, you know, when 
Little Dorrit and Maggy got back to the Marshalsea 
too late ; the gates were closed and there was nothing 
for it but for them to walk about the streets until 
they were opened again next morning : 

" They went back again to the gate, intending to wait there 
now until it should be opened ; but the air was so raw and cold 
that Little Dorrit, leading Maggy about in her sleep, kept in 
motion. Going round by the church, she saw lights there, 
and the door open, and went up the steps and looked in. 

" ' Who's that ? ' cried a stout man, who was putting on a 
nightcap as if he were going to bed in a vault. 

" ' It's no one particular, sir,' said Little Dorrit. 

" ' Stop ! ' cried the man. ' Let's have a look at you ! ' 

" This caused her to turn back, in the act of going out, and 
to present herself and her charge before him. 

" ' I thought so,' said he. ' I know you. 9 

" ' We have often seen each other,' said Little Dorrit, recog- 
nising the sexton, or the beadle, or the verger, or whatever he 
was, ' when I have been at church here.' 



186 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 






" ' More than that, we've got your birth in our Register, 
you know ; you're one of our curiosities.' 

" ' Indeed ? ' said Little Dorrit. 

" ' To be sure. As the child of the — by-the-bye, how did 
you get out so early ? ' 

'* ' We were shut out last night, and are waiting to get in.' 

" * You don't mean it ? And there's another hour good 
yet ! Come into the vestry. You'll find a fire in the vestry 
on account of the painters. I'm waiting for the painters, or I 
shouldn't be here, you may depend upon it. One of our 
curiosities mustn't be cold, when we have it in our power to 
warm her up comfortable. Come along.' 

" He was a very good old fellow in his familiar way ; and 
having stirred the vestry fire, he looked round the shelves 
of registers for a particular volume. ' Here you are, you see,' 
he said, taking it down and turning the leaves. ' Here you'll 
find yourself, as large as life. Amy, daughter of William and 
Fanny Dorrit. Born, Marshalsea Prison, Parish of St. George. 
And we tell people that you have lived there without so much 
as a day's or a night's absence ever since. Is it true ? ' 
• " * Quite true, till last night.' 

" ' Lord ! ' But his surveying her with an admiring gaze 
suggested something else to him, to wit : ' I am sorry to see, 
though, that you are faint and tired. Stay a bit. I'll get 
some cushions out of the church, and you and your friend shall 
lie down before the fire. Don't be afraid of not going in to 
join your father when the gate opens. I'll call you.' He 
soon brought in the cushions, and strewed them on the ground. 
1 There you are, you see. Again as large as life. Oh, never 
mind thanking. I've daughters of my own. And though 
they weren't born in the Marshalsea Prison, they might have 
been, if I had been, in my ways of carrying on, of your father's 
breed. Stop a bit. I must put something under the cushion 
for your head. Here's a burial volume. Just the thing ! We 
have got Mrs. Bangham in this book. But what makes these 
books interesting to most people is — not who's in 'em, but 
who isn't — who's coming, you know, and when. That's the 
interesting question.' 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 187 

" Commendingly looking back at the pillow he had impro- 
vised, he left them to their hour's repose. Maggy was snoring 
already, and Little Dorrit was soon fast asleep, with her head 
resting on that sealed book of Fate, untroubled by its mysterious 
blank leaves." 

Just past the church is Horsemonger Lane, which 
reminds you that Little Dorrit had a ridiculously 
impossible lover in Young John Chi very the son of 
a non-resident turnkey, and he " assisted his mother 
in the conduct of a snug tobacco business round 
the corner of Horsemonger Lane. . . . The tobacco 
business round the corner of Horsemonger Lane was 
carried on in a rural establishment one story high, 
which had the benefit of the air from the yards of 
Horsemonger Lane Jail, and the advantage of a retired 
walk under the wall of that pleasant establishment. 
The business was of too modest a character to support 
a life-size Highlander, but it maintained a little one 
on a bracket on the doorpost, who looked like a fallen 
Cherub that had found it necessary to take to a kilt." 
It is the same dingy, unwholesome, disreputable 
thoroughfare as ever, though it is now disguised as 
Long Lane ; moreover, you can get to it without 
passing the church, because a road has been cut to 
it through the churchyard ; and whenever Young 
John lost hope, and when Little Dorrit told him 
gently he must give up hoping altogether, he found 
comfort in imagining himself dead and in composing 
an affecting inscription to go on his tombstone in 
St. George's Churchyard, the severed portion of which 
is now a garden. 

Dickens is all about this neighbourhood. To the 
right, along Marshalsea Road, is the Farmhouse, still 



188 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

a common lodging-house, as it was when he went over 
it one day with Inspector Field, and the sketch he 
gives of it remains accurate. "It is the old Manor 
House of these parts and stood in the country once. . . . 
This long, paved yard was a garden or a paddock once, 
or a court in front of the Farm House. Perchance, 
with a dovecot in the centre, and fowls pecking about — 
with fair elm trees, then, where discoloured chimney- 
stacks and gables are now — noisy, then, with rooks 
which have yielded to a different sort of rookery. 
It is likelier than not, Inspector Field thinks, as we 
turn into the common kitchen, which is in the yard 
and many paces from the house." When I visited 
the Farmhouse it was to see a pedlar-poet who was 
dossing there for fourpence a night and has since 
risen to distinction and received a Civil List Pension. 
I went alone, for it is orderly and law-abiding now, 
but in Dickens's time it swarmed with sinister and 
dangerous characters, and was not to be visited safely 
unless you were accompanied by a police officer. 

Farther south lies Camberwell Green, and beyond 
that lived Wemmick with his father at the small 
house they called the Castle. On an important day 
when Pip called on him, he and Pip came out for a 
walk : " We went towards Camberwell Green, and 
when we were thereabouts, Wemmick said suddenly, 
' Hallo ! Here's a church ! ' " and added, as if he 
were animated by a brilliant idea, " Let's go in ! " 
There by the Green is the church, and who will may 
go in it. Inside, they beheld his father, " the Aged," 
entering by a side door escorting Miss Skiffins ; and 
producing and putting on a pair of white kid gloves, 
Wemmick exclaimed, in the same casual fashion, 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 189 

" Hallo ! Here's Miss Skiffins. Let's have a wedding." 
The clerk and clergyman appeared, Wemmick found 
a ring in his pocket, and, to Pip's amazement, was 
duly married. 

Nancy Lord, of Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee, 
lived in Grove Lane, Camberwell, " a long acclivity 
which starts from Camberwell Green and, after passing 
a few mean shops, becomes a road of suburban dwell- 
ings ; " and from Camberwell Green Nancy Lord and 
her brother, Miss Morgan and Samuel Barmby took 
a Westminster tram on their way to Charing Cross 
to see the illuminations in the London streets on the 
occasion of Queen Victoria's Jubilee. Samuel Barmby, 
by the way, lived in Coldharbour Lane, which is close 
to Camberwell Green, until he became a partner in 
Mr. Lord's business, when he removed to the more 
respectable Dagmar Street, not far from Grove Lane. 

Beyond Camberwell lies Brixton, and west of it is 
Kennington : Osmond Waymark, in Gissing's Unclassed, 
was teacher in a school at Brixton, and had lodgings 
in Walcot Square, Kennington ; and Kennington — 
Kennington Road particularly — and Battersea Park, 
which is still farther west, supplied the background 
for many of Gissing's scenes in The Unclassed, The 
Town Traveller, Thyrza, and the story of " Our' Mr. 
Jupp," in Human Odds and Ends. Mr. Gammon, the 
town traveller, lodged with Mrs Bubb in Kennington 
Road ; and you may follow the course he took that 
day when he walked down Kennington Road "at a 
leisurely pace, smiting his leg with his doubled dog- 
whip, and looking about him with his usual wide- 
awake, contented air," till on reaching the end of 
Upper Kennington Lane he struck towards Vauxhall 



190 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Station, and " a short railway journey and another 
pleasant saunter brought him to a china shop, off 
Battersea Park Road, over which stood the name of 
Clover ; " where Mrs. Clover lived with that mysterious 
husband of whom we have already seen something 
in Old Jewry. Vauxhall Station reminds you that 
round about here were the gardens of that name 
which, to say nothing of the actual public, were fre- 
quented by all manner of people out of the Restora- 
tion Comedies ; by Fanny Burney's Evelina and her 
friends ; Pendennis went there with Fanny Bolton 
and her mother, wife and daughter of the gatekeeper 
of Shepherd's Inn ; Dickens pictures " Vauxhall 
Gardens by Day," in the Sketches by Boz ; but they 
have been cut up into streets, and rows of plain, 
innocent suburban houses have been built over them. 
Minnie Clover, daughter of the china-shop people, 
was employed at Doulton's potteries, which you may 
see in the Vauxhall neighbourhood. Polly Sparkes, 
whom you saw with Christopher Parish at Liverpool 
Street Station, used to sell programmes at a theatre : 
you may stroll with her in Battersea Park, and then 
go back outside the bus with her to Kennington Road, 
where she also lodged at Mrs. Bubbs's. Along Ken- 
nington Road she and Christopher walked many 
times together, before that meeting at Liverpool 
Street Station, when she promised at last to marry 
him ; and in Kennington Road, Lydia Trent, of 
Gissing's Thyrza, met Luke Acroyd, and they walked 
aside into the quieter Walcot Square, whilst he told 
her how the scandalmongers were saying that her 
sister, Thyrza, went too often to see the wealthy 
young Mr. Egremont at the library he was forming 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 191 

and intending to open for the benefit of the neigh- 
bourhood. 

All Lambeth is thick with memories of Thyrza. 
Lydia and Thyrza lodged there, in Walnut Tree Walk, 
which turns out of Lambeth Walk : 

" For the most part it consists of old dwellings, which probably 
were the houses of people above the working class in days 
when Lambeth's squalor was confined within narrower limits. 
The doors are framed with dark wood, and have hanging 
porches. At the end of the street is a glimpse of trees growing 
in Kennington Road." 

In one of these houses lived Thyrza and Lydia in 
a top front room. There is a vivid little scene in which 
Lydia and Mary Bower, who had called for her, come 
from the house on the way to chapel, and at the 
Kennington Road corner of Walnut Tree Walk meet 
Acroyd, and Lydia lingers to tell him that her sister 
is not coming out that night, and tries to make him 
realise that Thyrza has no love for him. Gilbert 
Grail and his mother lodged in the same Walnut Tree 
Walk house, and you have Gilbert coming out one 
evening and going into Lambeth Walk where " the 
market of Christmas Eve was flaring and clamorous ; 
the odours of burning naphtha and fried fish were 
pungent on the wind : 

" He walked a short distance among the crowd, then found 
the noise oppressive and turned into a byway. As he did so, 
a street organ began to play in front of a public-house close by. 
Grail drew near ; there were children forming a dance, and he 
stood to watch them. 

" Do you know that music of obscure ways, to which children 
dance ? Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears' 
affliction beneath your windows in the square. To hear it 



192 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

aright you must stand in the darkness of such a by-street as 
this, and for the moment be at one with those who dwell around, 
in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim burrows of poverty, in 
the unmapped haunts of the semi-human. Then you will 
know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody ; a 
pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein 
the secret of hidden London will be half revealed. The life of 
men who toil without hope, yet with the hunger of an unshaped 
desire ; of women in whom the sweetness of their sex is perishing 
under labour and misery ; the laugh, the song of the girl who 
strives to enjoy her year or two of youthful vigor, knowing the 
darkness of the years to come ; the careless defiance of the 
youth who feels his blood and revolts against the lot which 
would tame it ; all that is purely human in these darkened 
multitudes speaks to you as you listen. It is the half -conscious 
striving of a nature which knows not what it would attain, 
which deforms a true thought by gross expression, which 
clutches at the beautiful and soils it with foul hands." 

It was not Gilbert Grail who stood near Lambeth 
Walk and listened to that music and thought thus of 
it, but Gissing himself, and Lambeth lays a spell 
upon you because wherever his characters go he also 
has been, and you are conscious of his presence. 
Gilbert went on and passed by Lambeth Church, whose 
bells " were ringing a harsh peal of four notes, un- 
changingly repeated/' and on to Lambeth Bridge, 
and pausing in the middle of it, " leaned on the 
parapet and looked northwards," at Westminster 
Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster 
Abbey, at the Archbishop's Palace, at St. Thomas's 
Hospital, and the string of barges moored in front of 
the Embankment. 

Luke Acroyd used to haunt a second-hand bookshop 
in Westminster Bridge Road, near the Bridge, and the 
shop is still there. He and Grail spoke of it one night 









L^ 






^ .vi^iU 



',,'F^.^ ' ^^< 



5 W' 




•^ — . ■'jytiDDLeleMPie* 



' /» Lamb Building that /aces you as you round the corner of the Church, 
Pendennis and Warrington had chambers on the third floor." 

Chapter ret 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 193 

as they walked together past the Archbishop's Palace ; 
then, " from the foot of Lambeth Bridge, turned into 
a district of small houses and multifarious workshops. 
Presently they entered Paradise Street," which was 
where Acroyd lived : 

" The name is less descriptive than it might be. Poor 
dwellings, mean and cheerless, are intersperced with factories 
and one or two small shops ; a public-house is prominent, and 
a railway arch breaks the perspective of the thoroughfare 
midway. The street at that time — in the year '80 — began by 
the side of a graveyard, no longer used, and associated in the 
minds of those who dwelt around it with numberless burials 
in a dire season of cholera. The space has since been converted 
into a flower-garden, open to the children of the neighbourhood, 
and in summer time the bright flower-beds enhance the ignoble 
baldness of the byway." 

Bowers shop, too — a small general shop — was in 
Paradise Street, close by the railway arch, and a 
meeting place for many of the people of the story. 
A resident in the adjacent Newport Street was 
Totty Nancarrow, one of the least respectable but 
most sympathetically drawn women-characters in the 
book. Before starting to found his library, Mr. 
Egremont, benevolently inspired, opened a lecture 
hall in a room over a saddler's shop in High Street, 
Lambeth. Later, after the library troubles had com- 
menced, when Thyrza was wildly in love with Egre- 
mont and wretched because she had not seen him for 
some time, she went out one evening from Walnut 
Tree Walk, and calling to see Totty Nancarrow, in 
Newport Street, found she was not at home, so sat 
in her room waiting for her. By-and-by, she heard 
Egremont's voice ; he had called to interview another 
lodger, Mr. Bunce, and as soon as she heard the street 

13 



194 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

door close behind him, she ran down and went in 
pursuit ; she overtook him, and on Lambeth Bridge 
they had what was to be their last talk together. 
But the homes and haunts of these people in Thyrza 
are thick about Lambeth : in Paradise Street, and 
Ground Street ; along Westminster Bridge Road ; 
in the New Cut, where Mr. Boddy once had a shop ; 
and while you are there you may recollect that 
M. Fandango, of Christopher Tadpole, was " a pro- 
fessor of dancing in the New Cut," and Luke, in 
Massinger's City Madam, complains that his gentlemen 
'prentices waste their time in the evil haunts of the 
neighbouring Lambeth Marsh. 

On the morning of the 3rd September 1803, Words- 
worth lingered on Westminster Bridge (not the present 
one, I am sorry to say, but its predecessor) and wrote 
one of the finest of his sonnets : 

Earth has not anything to show more fair : 
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 
A sight so touching in its majesty : 
The city now doth like a garment wear 
The beauty of the morning ; silent, bare, 
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie 
Open unto the fields and to the sky, 
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. 
Never did sun more beautifully steep 
In his first splendour valley, rock or hill, 
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! 
The river glideth at his own sweet will ; 
Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep, 
And all that mighty heart is lying still. 

Over Waterloo Bridge passed Pendennis, that day 
he bent his steps to Vauxhall ; and I like to remember 
that " the jolly man " in Albert Smith's Christopher 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 195 

Tadpole told Mr. Sprouts he had a brother-in-law who 
kept a firework factory near Bedlam, and whose father 
was a waiter at Vauxhall. Bedlam, or Bethlehem 
Hospital, is at the end of Blackfriars Road, and past 
Bedlam more than once went Totty Nancarrow when 
she was going to St. George's comparatively new 
Roman Catholic Cathedral, which is near by : 

" She entered and at the proper place dropped on her knees 
and crossed herself. Then she stood looking about. Near her, 
hanging against a pillar, was a box with the superscription : 
\ For the Souls in Purgatory.' She always put a penny into 
this box, and did so now. Then she walked softly to an image 
of the Virgin, at whose feet someone had laid hot-house flowers. 
A poor woman was kneeling there, a woman in rags ; her head 
was bent in prayer, her hands clasped against her breast. Totty 
knelt beside her, bent her own head, and clasped her hands." 

All about Bedlam and St. George's Circus is the 
ground where the Gordon Rioters gathered, as you 
may learn from Barnaby Rudge, in what was then 
St. George's Fields. When David Copperfield had 
resolved to run away from Murdstone and Grinby's, 
he left their premises in the Blackfriars Road, one 
evening, and " saw a long-legged young man with 
a very little empty donkey-cart standing near the 
Obelisk in the Blackfriars Road " — the Obelisk is at 
St. George's Circus — and he arranged for the young 
man to accompany him to his lodgings in the Borough 
and carry his box to the coach-office for dispatch to 
Dover. The young man went with him, as you know, 
and got the box on to his barrow and heartlessly ran 
away with it. While Dickens was himself living at 
Lant Street, in the Borough, and working at the 
blacking factory by Hungerford Stairs, " My usual 



196 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

way home," he says, " was over Blackfriars Bridge, 
and down that turning in the Blackfriars Road which 
has Rowland Hill's chapel on one side, and the like- 
ness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop 
door on the other." The chapel is gone : it was 
transformed into a boxing saloon, last time I passed 
it ; but the golden dog still licking the golden pot 
remains at the other corner, so much more enduring 
are the things men make with their hands than are 
the hands that made them. 

If there were no such things as time and space to 
consider, we would certainly go east of all the Bridges 
to Deptford, where Christopher Marlowe was killed 
in his duel with Archer, the player, and where he lies 
buried in St. Nicholas's churchyard ; John Evelyn 
had a sitting in that same church, and round about it 
and round the church of St. Paul's are the streets and 
lanes and taverns and houses that are familiar to any- 
one who has read that best of Sir Walter Besant's 
romances, The World Went Very Well Then, which he 
founded, as he mentions in a preface, " on the 
Chronicles of Deptford, and on a tombstone in the 
Church of St. Nicholas," possibly the tombstone to 
the memory of " Captain George Shelvocke," who was 
" bred to sea-service under Admiral Benbow," for 
though the hero of the tale is Jack Easterbrook, and 
the date of it is something later than Benbow's time, 
George Shelvocke is one of its characters, and the talk 
of Shelvocke about his seafaring adventures largely 
influences Jack to a yearning for the life of a sailor. 
But we will keep within range of the Bridges, and the 
last of these that we will say any more of here is 
Southwark Bridge. 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 197 

On Southwark Bridge (which is being altered and 
widened whilst I write) young John Chivery walked 
with Little Dorrit and was brought at length to under- 
stand that she could never love him ; she sat on one 
of the seats after he had left her, " and not only rested 
her little hand upon the rough wall, but laid her face 
against it, too, as if her head were heavy, and her 
mind were sad." And Dickens came over Southwark 
Bridge that day he had been ill at the blacking factory, 
when one of the boys who worked with him, Bob Fagin, 
insisted on accompanying him home. He only slept in 
Lant Street and took his meals in the prison with his 
father, and was ashamed that this should be known : 

" I was too proud to let him know about the prison, and 
after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which 
Bob Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him 
on the steps of a house near Southwark Bridge, on the Surrey 
side, making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece 
of reality, in case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, 
I recollect, and asked, when the woman opened it, if that was 
Mr Robert Fagin's house." 

Let me remind you here that when, a chapter or 
two back, we saw Dr. Luttrel of Besant's Bell of St. 
Paul's, purchase for five pounds the small boy Sam, 
of his grandmother in Sweet Lilac Walk, Spitalfields, 
Sam's little sister, Sal, pursued the Doctor's cab to see 
where the boy was taken : overtook it, hung on 
behind and was carried with it through the City, up 
Queen Street, and across Southwark Bridge : 

" On the other side it presently turned to the right into a 
region of small streets, with mean houses standing among 
great factories. In one of these streets it stopped. Sal slid 
down quickly and retreated to the shelter of a neighbouring 
lamp-post where, half hidden, she could watch. When the 



198 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

gentleman had gone into the house and the cab had driven 
away, the child left her lamp-post and examined at her ease 
both house and street. The house was easy to remember. 
It was of two stories with three windows at the top, and two 
below ; the door between the two was not an ordinary door, 
but set back in a broad frame with two short pillars, not form- 
ing a porch but flat with the front of the house. They were 
pillars of the Doric order, and the girl noted their shape though 
she knew not its name. . . . There was a brass plate on the 
door — the girl could not read, yet she could remember the 
appearance of the letters — they announced that Robert Luttrel, 
M.D., lived and presumably practised the science of healing 
in that house." 

There were "works " in the street, and a Church, 
and at the end was the river. The whole description 
is that of Emerson Street, and the house with the 
two short pillars is still to be seen in it. The street 
opened on to Bankside, and all along Bankside 
is reminiscent of The Bell of St. Paul's, as well as 
of much older and far more glorious literature. A 
stone's throw away on the eastern side of Southwark 
Bridge glooms that brewery which has replaced 
Shakespeare's theatre, The Globe. From Bankside, 
on this western side of the Bridge, goes Rose Alley, 
indicating the site of the theatre of that name that 
was contemporary with The Globe. A few paces on, 
and you note another alley called Bear Garden, and you 
remember the Bear Garden on Bankside so often 
spoken of in Elizabethan writings. Adjacent is Love 
Lane, in Shakespeare's day a green, country lane, 
now a barren, black alley with walls of factories 
towering up on either hand. Laurence Waller, over 
from Australia in search of certain members of his 
family, took up lodgings with Mr. Lucius Cottle, on 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 199 

Bankside, and you will find an ample description of 
the place in The Bell of St. Paul's, and something of 
its history. The ancient wooden wall that Besant 
wrote of, the steps down to the water, the noticeable 
house occupied by Mr. Cottle and his family, the view 
from Bankside of the city across the river — it is all so 
little changed that I shall quote with as little further 
comment as possible : 

" It was the evening of the longest day of all the year. . . . 
About a quarter past eight on this day a young man was lean- 
ing over the wooden wall of the old first and original — for 
many years the only Embankment, called Bank Side, watching 
the river, and the City on the other side. He stood at that 
spot — it is on the west of Southwark Bridge, where there are 
Stairs. They are not ancient Stairs : they are not those at 
which the Elizabethan citizens landed to see the matinee at 
the Globe, to catch a fleeting rapture at the Baiting of the 
Bear, or to make love among the winding walks of Paris 
Gardens. These Stairs are mere modern things constructed 
in the last century. But some thoughtful Resident, ancient 
or modern, has caused to be built above them a small pen, 
enclosure or fold, furnished with two wooden benches, capable 
of holding at least four persons, and forming a gazebo or belve- 
dere from which to view the river and to take the air. . . . 
Where the young man stood, if he looked down the river he 
could see, close at hand, Southwark Bridge, and beyond it the 
ugly railway bridge, running into the ugly railway station : 
both together shut out the view of all that lay beyond — London 
Bridge and the Tower and the masts of the ships in the Pool. 
Even the most splendid sunset cannot make the Cannon Street 
Terminus beautiful. But if he looked up the river he saw, first, 
Blackfriars Bridge, standing out with sharp clear lines, as if 
cut out of black cardboard ; above it, the dazzling golden 
light of the western sky, and below it the broad bosom of the 
river at the flood. . . . Then he looked across the river. 
Immediately opposite rose the pile of St. Paul's, vast and 



200 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

majestic — Bank Side is now the only place where you have a 
really good view of St. Paul's. On either side of St. Paul's rose 
in lesser glory the spire of St. Bride, the Dragon of Bow, the 
pinnacles of Aldermarie, the Tower of St. Michael's, and I know 
not how many more of Wren's masterpieces. . . . Below the 
Churches, on the northern bank, are the wharves and ware- 
houses — Paul's Wharf, Baynard's Castle, and the ancient Port 
of Queenhithe. This old harbour still retaineth its former 
shape, though its buildings, which were once low, mean and 
ugly, yet picturesque, have long since been transformed into 
others, bigger and uglier, yet not picturesque." 

The young man gazing on these things was Laurence 
Waller ; and turning from the river, he presently 
surveys the houses facing it, and " the old Embank- 
ment with its wooden walls : " 

" The place was littered with coils of rusty chain and bits of 
rusty machinery. There were cranes for the hoisting of things 
in and out of the barges ; there were stairs to the water ; there 
were planks lying in position for the wheelbarrows between 
the Embankment and the barges : on the other side of the 
road were gates leading to factories, works and wharves." 

Which is all as it is to-day, and there still is that 
house — " quite the cleanest and most respectable 
house on Bank Side " — wherein Laurence Waller had 
taken lodgings, and as Laurence was looking at it, 
in his general view of Bankside, he saw Mr. Lucius 
Cottle come out : "he descended the two door-steps 
with as much dignity as if they had been the staircase 
of a Venetian Palazzo. . . . Then he turned and 
contemplated the house . . . with infinite pride. 
Certainly the brightest, the most recently painted, 
and the cleanest on the whole Embankment. . . . 
There were clean white curtains to all the windows ; 
the iron railings in the front were clean ; the windows 



SOUTH OF THE THAMES 201 

were bright ; the brass knocker and the handle 
were polished ; the door-steps were white." Althea 
was Cottle's niece, and she and one of his daughters 
were out in a boat which brought them back to the 
stairs whilst Cottle and Laurence stood conversing ; 
they all crossed and entered the house together, and 
indoors Laurence was introduced to them and the 
rest of the family. It was not many days before 
Laurence and Althea came to the head of the stairs, 
descended them and went boating thence together, 
he at the oars, she steering. 

There was an occasion when she conducted him all 
along Bankside, reconstructing it, pointing out 
ancient landmarks and describing them as they used 
to be when Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, and 
their friends trod these ways in the flesh : 

' Let us begin. See, now, this is Love Lane.' 
Laurence looked down a dark passage with high 
buildings on either side, so narrow that there was 
hardly room for two men to pass each other.' ' She 
goes on to explain that Love Lane ran along the west 
side of Paris Gardens, and to tell him something of 
the bear-baiting and bull-baiting that went on there. 
Then at the end of Bankside, they turn off into 
Holland Street, and pass the decaying, dirty old houses 
in it, and Hopton's quiet, rather forlorn looking Alms- 
houses, and so round to the left, past the other end of 
Love Lane, Bear Garden, and other alleys that wind 
up from Bankside, until they pass under the arches of 
Southwark Bridge. " A little beyond the Bridge 
begins the wall of the great Brewery. Althea stopped 
before this wall. 'There,' she said, 'is the Globe 
Theatre.' " A tablet on the brewery wall testifies to 



202 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

the fact that here it used to be ; but Park Street, as 
it is now ironically called, has lost all its happier 
aspect, as well as its theatre — it is as sombre and 
hideous a street as any in London ; spanned at one 
end by the railway arches, shut in by great gloomy 
buildings, there is something, blind and deaf and 
infinitely depressing in the very look of it ; and if 
you follow the street to its end it takes you into 
Clink Street, which marks what were once the Liber- 
ties of the horrible old Prison of that name. It and 
other of the streets round it, are composed solely of 
mighty flour mills, factories, warehouses — nobody 
lives in them, and if you traverse them of an evening 
after they are all closed, they wear a grim, forbidding 
aspect, there is a sense of vague terror hovering in 
the air of those gaunt, narrow, high, utterly silent and 
deserted thoroughfares, as if they were streets in a 
city of the dead, or as if the blight of the old Prison 
lay heavy upon them — as if it rose like a foul miasma 
from the ground on which so many sorry rascals 
and poor wretches have suffered, rose, when the twi- 
light came and the warehouses were all locked up and 
the workers departed, and drifted up between the tall, 
close walls, over the pinched, crooked roadways, to 
make the night here darker, lonelier and more haunted 
with dread than it is in places that are not built where 
so many lives have been brutally wasted and so much 
misery endured. 

But we have done with the South of the Thames. 
We are going back to Southwark Bridge and over it ; 
up Cannon Street to St. Paul's, which we have already 
seen from a distance when we leaned with Laurence 
Waller over the wooden wall of Bankside. 



CHAPTER IX 

IN THE SHADOW OF ST. PAUL'S 

THIS is not the St. Paul's that the Elizabethans 
knew : the St. Paul's that had the little chapel 
of St. Faith down in its crypt, when Beaumont and 
Fletcher made Humphrey, in The Knight of the Burning 
Pestle, swear that, since his wife had gone from him he 
would, in the dark, 

wear out my shoe-soles 
In passion, in Saint Faith's church under Paul's. 

That St. Paul's had a steeple, and its nave was a 
meeting place for all the gentlemen about town, and 
a market-place for pedlars and costermongers, till 
the state of things became a crying scandal and had 
to be put an end to. The plays of the old dramatists 
are full of references to it and its steeple, and the 
motley crowd that met and transacted business and 
occasionally fought duels in its nave. It is that 
earlier building that stands in Ainsworth's Old St. 
Paul's, and he sends the weird, half -mad Solomon 
Eagle up to walk on its high parapet carrying his 
brazier of blazing charcoal and shouting forth warnings 
of doom over the plague-smitten City. Old St. Paul's 
was destroyed in the Great Fire, but the new one, that 
Wren built in its place, is old now and rich in associa- 
tions of its own. 



204 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

It has been the scene of many notable events in 
the nation's history ; under its aisles great men, as 
Nelson and Wellington, Reynolds, Turner, Millais, 
Leighton, Sullivan, lie buried, 

Here in streaming London's central roar, 

and a multitude of men famous the world over have 
entered its splendid portals one time or another in 
the last two centuries. " Seeing the door of St. Paul's, 
under one of the semicircular porches, was partially 
open," writes Nathaniel Hawthorne, recording his 
own visit to London, " I went in, and found that the 
afternoon service was about to be performed ; so I 
remained to hear it, and to see what I could of the 
cathedral. ... It is pleasant to stand in the centre 
of the cathedral," he adds, writing of his rovings about 
it after the service, " and hear the noise of London, 
loudest all round this spot — how it is calmed into a 
sound as proper to be heard through the aisles as the 
sound of its own organ." The sight of the great 
dome dominating London, soaring high above it, 

Afloat upon etherial tides, 

as John Davidson has it, impressed John Browdie, of 
Nicholas Nickleby, when he and Tilda saw it from the 
top of the coach as they rode into London down St. 
Martin's le Grand, from the north, no less than it 
impressed the negro, Gumbo, when he and young Give 
Newcome saw it as they rode into London over London 
Bridge, from the south ; and Hood gives you a notion 
of what London looks like when you view it from above 
the dome, in his Moral Reflections on the Cross of St. 
Paul's : 



IN THE SHADOW OF ST. PAUL'S 205 

The man that pays his pence and goes 

Up to thy lofty cross, St. Paul's, 
Looks over London's naked nose : 
Women and men, 
The world is all beneath his ken, 
He sits above the Ball, 
He seems on mount Olympus' top 
Among the gods, by Jupiter ! and lets drop 
His eyes from the empyreal clouds 
On mortal crowds. 

Seen from these skies 

How small those emmets in our eyes ! . . . 
Oh ! what are men ? — Beings so small 

That should I fall 
Upon their little heads I must 
Crush them by hundreds into dust ! 

Out of The Bell of St. Paul's came Althea into St. 
Paul's Churchyard with her old father, the poet, 
Mr. Indagine, who was hankering to revisit the haunts 
of his youth : 

" They stood at last on the steps of St. Paul's, and looked 
down upon the crowd of Ludgate Hill. ' Thus I stood,' said 
the Poet, ' more than thirty years ago. It was midnight, but 
the streets were crowded, because the City was illuminated 
for the Peace.' . . . They descended the steps. ' Let us pay 
a visit to the Row,' he said ; ' it is long since my eyes were 
gladdened with a sight of the only trade worth attention.' " 

He took her through a narrow passage — there are 
half a dozen narrow passages on the northern side of 
the Churchyard — into Paternoster Row, still as almost 
wholly devoted to publishing as it was four or five 
centuries ago, and still the same narrow, cart-blocked 
thoroughfare it was when Southey went there to call 
on his publishers, the Longmans, who are still there, 



206 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 






when Chatterton hovered about the Chapter Coffee 
House, some remnant of which remains in the new 
building at the corner of Chapter House Court, and 
when Charlotte Bronte put up, for a few days, in the 
same celebrated establishment, which had earlier 
associations too with Goldsmith and his contempor- 
aries. Pendennis's publisher, Mr Bungay, had his 
shop in Paternoster Row, and on a memorable occasion 
Pendennis and Warrington drove to his door in a 
carriage, to attend a dinner that Bungay was giving 
to his friends and clients. The dinner was furnished 
by the caterer Griggs, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and 
one of the waiters, " a very bow- windowed man," 
was, according to the humorist, Wagg, " an under- 
taker in Amen Corner, and attends funerals and 
dinners." We will go the western end of Paternoster 
Row, which is Amen Corner, with Althea and Mr. 
Indagine, before we return to the Churchyard : 

" He led the way down the Row to the end where wooden 
gates stood at the end of a broad court. ' My dear, it is Amen 
Corner/ he said. ' Let us look in. I remember coming here 
day after day, thinking how quiet and happy must be those 
who lived in this Cloister.' ... He opened the gate and led 
the way into the place : there is a row of quiet looking houses 
and then one turns into a broad court covered with ground ivy 
instead of grass, but with a few flower beds and trees and red- 
gabled buildings, with an archway in red brick like a college." 

It is all there, as they saw it ; but we leave them 
going on into Ludgate Hill, and go back to St. Paul's 
Churchyard. Scattered round the Churchyard once 
were the shops of publishers ; you may find the names 
and signs of them recorded on the title-pages of 
hundreds of Elizabethan and Georgian volumes. 



IN THE SHADOW OF ST. PAUL'S 207 

But nowadays it is mostly given over to the silk, 
cotton and woollen trades ; and I like to remember 
that W. B. Rands (Matthew Browne) in 1866 dedi- 
cated a volume of his essays (and he is an essayist 
too much and too foolishly neglected) to " George 
Bowness Carr, Esquire, of Westmoreland and London, 
Merchant, and all Friends round St. Paul's ; " from 
which I take it he was someway connected with Mr. 
Carr's business — had possibly been a clerk in his 
warehouse here. 

" Walking without any definite object through St. 
Paul's Churchyard," you read in one of the Sketches 
by Boz, " we happened to turn down a street entitled 
1 Paul's Chain,' and keeping straight forward for a 
few hundred yards, found ourselves, as a natural 
consequence, in Doctors' Commons ; " and there 
follows a description of the old Divorce Court that is 
there no longer. " ' Boots,' said Mr. Jingle to Sam 
Weller, in a room of that White Hart, where we saw 
him in our last chapter, ' Do you know — what's a- 
name — Doctors' Commons ? ' ■ Yes, sir.' ' Where is 
it ? ' ' Paul's Churchyard, sir ; low archway on the 
carriage side, bookseller's at one corner, hot-el on the 
other, and two porters in the middle as touts for 
licences.' . . . ' What do they do ? ' inquired the 
gentleman. 

" ' Do ! You, sir ! That an't the worst on it, neither. They 
put things into old gen'lm'ns heads as they never dreamed of. 
My father, sir, vos a coachman. A vidower he vos, and fat 
enough for anything — uncommon fat, to be sure. His missus 
dies, and leaves him four hundred pound. Down he goes to 
the Commons, to see the lawyer and draw the blunt — wery 
smart — top boots on— nosegay in his button-hole — broad- 



208 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

brimmed tile — green shawl — quite the gen'lm'n. Goes through 
the archvay, thinking how he should inwest the money — up 
comes the touter, touches his hat — ' Licence, sir, licence ? ' — 
' What's that ? ' says my father. ' Licence, sir/ says he. — 
' What licence ? ' says my father. — ' Marriage licence/ says the 
t outer. — ' Dash my veskit/ says my father, ' I never thought 
o' that.' — ' I think you wants one, sir/ says the touter. My 
father pulls up, and thinks a bit — ' No/ says he, ' damme, I'm 
too old, b'sides I'm a many sizes too large/ says he. — ' Not a bit 
on it, sir/ says the touter. — ' Think not ? ' says my father. — 
' I'm sure not/ says he ; 'we married a gen'lm'n twice your size 
last Monday.' — ' Did you, though/ says my father. — ' To be 
sure ve did/ says the touter, ' you're a babby to him — this vay, 
sir — this vay ! ' — and sure enough my father walks arter him, 
like a tame monkey behind a horgan, into a little back office, 
vere a feller sat among dirty papers and tin boxes, making 
believe to be busy. ' Pray take a seat, vile I makes out the 
affadavit, sir/ says the lawyer. — ' Thankee, sir/ says my father, 
and down he sat and stared vith all his eyes, and his mouth 
vide open, at the names on the boxes. — ' What's your name, 
sir ? ' says the lawyer. — ' Tony Weller/ says my father. — 
1 Parish ? ' says the lawyer. — ' Belle Savage/ says my father ; 
for he stopped there ven he drove up, and he know'd nothing 
about parishes, he didn't. ' And what's the lady's name ? ' 
says the lawyer. My father was struck all of a heap. ' Blessed 
if I know/ says he. — ' Not know ! ' says the lawyer. — ' No more 
nor you do,' says my father, ' can't I put that in arterwards ? ' 
— ' Impossible ! ' says the lawyer — ' Wery well/ says my 
father, after he'd thought a moment, ' put down Mrs Clarke.' — 
' What Clarke ? ' says the lawyer, dipping his pen in the ink. — 
1 Susan Clarke, Markis o' Granby, Dorking/ says my father ; 
' she'll have me, if I ask her, I des-say — I never said nothing 
to her, but she'll have me, I know.' The licence was made out, 
and she did have him, and what's more she's got him now ; 
and / never had any of the four hundred pound, worse luck ! ' " 

David Copperfield was articled to a firm of proctors, 
Messrs. Spenlow and Jorkins, in Doctors' Commons, 




^^ Jredydcock 



The meeting place of Tom Pinch and his sister, in "Ma? tin Chuzziezvit." 

Chapter 10 



IN THE SHADOW OF ST. PAUL'S 209 

•' a lazy old nook near St. Paul's Churchyard ... a 
little out-of-the-way place where they administer 
ecclesiastical law ; " or used to until the New Law 
Courts were built in the Strand. He called for his 
Aunt, Betsy Trotwood, at her rooms in Lincoln's 
Inn Fields, and they went afoot by Fleet Street and 
up Ludgate Hill, to St. Paul's Churchyard. In 
Ludgate Hill, she was startled by the sight of that 
mysterious, miserable rascal, her husband — the pitiful 
wretch of whose existence David had no knowledge, 
and who was secretly blackmailing her. She told 
Copperfield to call a coach for her, and to go on and 
wait in St. Paul's Churchyard ; he saw her and the 
man get into the coach here and drive on, and after 
he had waited half an hour in the Churchyard for her, 
she came back in the coach alone, and they con- 
tinued their journey together. " Doctors' Commons 
was approached by a little low archway. Before we 
had taken many places down the street beyond it, 
the noise of the city seemed to melt as if by magic, 
into a softened distance. A few dull courts and 
narrow ways brought us to the sky-lighted offices of 
Spenlow and Jorkins." Here David Copperfield 
came daily to study his profession ; here he dreamed 
and was happy and wretched in his wild love for Dora 
Spenlow ; and one day he accompanied Mr. Spenlow 
to " a certain coffee-house, which in those days had 
a door opening into the Commons, just within the 
little archway in St. Paul's Churchyard," and there 
he found Miss Murdstone awaiting him : she had dis- 
covered that he loved Dora and was writing to her, 
had intercepted his letters and betrayed him to Mr. 
Spenlow, who demanded his daughter's letters back 

14 



210 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

and declared that all this " youthful folly " must be 
at an end. 

The archway is gone within the last year or two, 
but here still is the street, the last on the left before 
you reach Ludgate Hill — the street down which David 
and Betsy Trotwood walked, and at the entrance to 
which Mr. Weller was waylaid by the tout. More 
recently, Mr. Gammon, of Gissing's Town Traveller 
came with Mr. Clover, otherwise Lord Polperro, into 
St. Paul's Churchyard, and witnessed a scene that 
happens there still at the end of every year. Their 
cab ascended Ludgate Hill with difficulty through 
a mob that was going the same way : " the people 
were thronging to hear St. Paul's strike the midnight 
hour ; " and when Gammon found that Mr. Greenacre 
was not waiting for them at the Bilboes, he suggested 
that he and Polperro should stroll back to St. Paul's 
and look at the crowd : 

" It seemed probable that when they had gone a little distance 
Lord Polperro would feel shaky and consent to take a cab. 
Drink, however, had invigorated the man ; he reeled a little 
and talked very huskily, but declared that the walk was 
enjoyable. 

" ' Let's get into the crowd, Gammon, I like a crowd. What 
are those bells ringing for ? Yes, yes, of course, I remember — 
New Year's Eve. I had no idea that people came here to see 
the New Year in. I shall come again. I shall come every 
year ; it's most enjoyable.' 

" They entered the Churchyard, and were soon amid a noisy, 
hustling throng, an assembly composed of clerks, roughs and 
pickpockets, with a sprinkling of well-to-do rowdies, and 
numerous girls or women, whose shrieks, screams and yelps 
sounded above the deeper notes of masculine uproar. Gammon, 
holding tight to his companion's arm, endeavoured to pilot 



IN THE SHADOW OF ST. PAUL'S 211 

him in the direction where the crowd was thinnest, still moving 
westward ; but Lord Polperro caught the contagion of the 
tumult and began pressing vehemently into the surging mass* 

" ' This does me good, Gammon. It's a long time since 
I've mixed with people. I always enjoyed a crowd. Hollo — 
o — o ! ' His excited shout made him cough terribly ; none 
the less he pushed on. 

" ' You'll come to harm/ said the other. ' Don't be a fool ; 
get out of this.' 

" A struggle began between them. . . . Lord Polperro did 
not resent the tugs at his arm ; he took it for genial horseplay, 
and only shouted louder. . . . Blackguards in front of him 
were bellowing a filthy song ; his lordship tried to join in the 
melody. A girl who was jammed against him shot liquid into 
his ear out of a squirt, and another of her kind knocked his 
hat off. . . . Polperro happened to press against a drunken 
woman ; she caught him by his disordered hair and tugged at 
it, yelling into his face. To release himself he bent forward, 
pushing the woman away ; the result was a violent blow 
from her fist, after which she raised a shriek as if of pain or 
terror. Instantly a man sprang forward to her defence, and he, 
too, planted his fist between the eyes of the hapless peer." 

Gammon tackled this rough, the fighting became 
more or less general, in the thick of it Polperro fell ; 
the police interfered and Gammon was swept away 
in the rush. " From church towers east and west 
the chimes rang merrily for the New Year. Softly 
fell the snow from a black sky, and was forthwith 
trodden into slush/' Presently, when Gammon had 
managed to struggle back to the scene of the disturb- 
ance, he found Lord Polperro lying unconscious with 
a ring of police round him, and after he had revealed 
the identity of the injured man they took him in 
a cab to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, in Smithfield, 
where he ended by dying of his injuries. 



212 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

On the Sunday evening of his arrival in London, 
Arthur Clennam, of Little Dorrit, oppressed by the 
gloom of a London Sunday, " sat in the window of the 
coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the 
neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of 
songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how 
many sick people it might be the death of in the 
course of the year. . . . He sat in the same place as 
the day died, looking at the dull houses opposite, and 
thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former in- 
habitants were ever conscious of them, how they 
must pity themselves for their old places of imprison- 
ment. . . . Presently the rain began to fall in 
slanting lines between him and those houses. . . . 
In the country, the rain would have developed a 
thousand fresh scents, and every drop would have 
had its bright association with some beautiful form or 
growth of life. In the city, it developed only foul 
stale smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, 
wretched addition to the gutters." He watched a 
crowd sheltering " under the public archway opposite," 
which must have been the arch into Ludgate Square, 
and enables you to locate the position of the coffee- 
house. Putting on his hat and coat, Clennam went 
out through this dismal weather, " crossed by St. 
Paul's," and made his way towards that decaying old 
house of his mother's down by Thames Street. 

The Citizen's Wife, sitting as one of the audience, 
in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning 
Pestle, alarmed by the threats of Jasper, in the scene 
on the stage, shouts to her husband : " Away, George, 
away ! raise the watch at Ludgate, and bring a 
mittimus from the justice for this desperate villain ! " 



IN THE SHADOW OF ST. PAUL'S 213 

The watch-house was by the gate, and Lud Gate barred 
the Hill just on the city side of Old Bailey, until 
towards the end of the eighteenth century. In 
Webster's indifferent drama, The Famous History of 
Sir Thomas Wyatt, he brings Wyatt to Lud Gate, 
heading a rebellion against Mary, in favour of Lady 
Elizabeth. He and his handful of adherents come 
up from Fleet Street, and are halted here : 

Soft ! this is Ludgate : stand aloof ; I'll knock. 

He knocks, and the Earl of Pembroke appearing on 
the walls scoffs at Wyatt's demand to 

Open your gates, you lowering citizens, 

and threatens to turn his cannon on them unless they 
leave the city gates without delay. Wyatt feels that 
discretion is the better part, and orders his troops to 
" march back towards Fleet Street," and on the way, 
disheartened by this failure, they fall from him and, 
deserted and alone, he is soon captured without 
difficulty. 

Near the foot of Ludgate Hill, on the right, is La 
Belle Sauvage, the old inn yard that Mr. Weller 
named as his parish, because it happened to be the 
stopping place of the coach he drove. The yard 
keeps its ancient shape, but you will find nothing of 
the inn there, nor of the house in which Grinling 
Gibbons used to live. 

Before we pass on into Fleet Street, turn aside to 
the right up Farringdon Street, for all along here, 
on the right-hand side of the way, where the Memorial 
Hall is, Fleet Prison use'd to stand. When Lady 
Frugal, in Massinger's City Madam is preparing a 



214 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

banquet, she asks her steward what cooks he has 
provided. " The best of the city," he assures her : 
" they've wrought at my Lord Mayor's," but her 
daughter Anne ejaculates scornfully : 

Fie on them ! they smell of Fleet Lane and Pie Corner ! 

Fleet Lane is here, the first turning you come to 
in Farringdon Street : Pie Corner you have seen in 
Smithfield. Fleet Ditch ran in the middle of Far- 
ringdon Street ; Fleet Market was a-litter and a-roar 
on either side of it. When Kitty Pleydell came to 
London, after the death of her father, to look for her 
uncle, the Rev. Gregory Shovel, she and her maid 
were directed by a maid at the St. Paul's Coffee-house 
to tell their coachman to drive them " down Ludgate 
Hill and up the Fleet Market on the prison side ; he 
may stop at the next house to the third Pen and 
Hand. You will find the doctor's name written on a 
card in the window." He was, in fact, in Prison for 
debt, but was allowed to live in the Liberties, which 
extended to certain houses and streets outside the 
walls, and there he carried on his profession, as a 
Doctor of Divinity, and was so famous for his conduct 
of those shameful but legal unions known as Fleet 
Marriages, that he had been nicknamed the Chaplain 
of the Fleet. There and thus they found him, and 
learned from his clerical tout that he drove a brisk 
trade in weddings at a guinea apiece, and in The 
Chaplain of the Fleet Besant gives you an excellent 
picture of the Prison as it was in the eighteenth 
century, and of the motley, drunken, squalid, wasted 
lives that were lived in it. Hoyst, in The City Madam, 
being arrested for debt cries out recklessly : 



IN THE SHADOW OF ST. PAUL'S 215 

Do your worst, I care not, 
I'll be removed to the Fleet and drink and drab there 
In spite of your teeth. 

But one could fill a book with the literary associations 
of the Fleet Prison of those days, and earlier and 
later. The brilliant, shiftless journalist, Shandon, in 
Pendennis, lived with his wife and family and worked 
in the Fleet Prison ; he started and edited " The Pall 
Mall Gazette " from there, and Warrington and 
Pendennis, two of his staff, found him in his room 
there, engaged with his publisher : 

" Pen had never seen this scene of London life, and walked 
with no small interest in at the grim gate of that dismal edifice. 
They went through the anteroom, where the officers and 
janitors of the place were seated, and passing in at the wicket, 
entered the prison. The noise and the crowd, the life and 
the shouting, the shabby bustle of the place, struck and excited 
Pen. People moved about ceaselessly and restless, like caged 
animals in a menagerie. Men were playing at fives. Others 
pacing and tramping : this one in colloquy with his lawyer 
in dingy black — that one walking sadly, with his wife by his 
side and a child on his arm. Some were arrayed in tattered 
dressing gowns, and had a look of rakish fashion. Everybody 
seemed to be busy, humming, and on the move. Pen felt as 
if he choked in the place, and as if the door being locked upon 
him they would never let him out. They went through a court, 
up a stone staircase, and through passages full of people, and 
noise, and cross lights, and black doors clapping and banging ; 
Pen feeling as one does in a feverish morning dream." 

Shandon, in his careless, haphazard style, was not 
altogether unhappy amid these surroundings ; it was 
sad enough for his wife, who felt their position keenly, 
and was lonely and outcast, but he had his work to 



216 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

do, and found alleviation in drinking freely with the 
other inmates. 

To the Fleet Prison Mr. Pickwick was conveyed 
when he refused to pay the damages awarded to Mrs. 
Bardell in her breach of promise action, and you will 
know from the Pickwick Papers what a vile, barbarous, 
pitiful, heart-breaking place the prison was in its 
latter days. For Mr. Pickwick, with his natural 
benevolence, went about among the humours and the 
tragedies of it, saw the disorder and bestial dissipa- 
tions of it, and the dirt, the hideous poverty and 
blank despair that were shut up ruthlessly within it. 
He could pity Mr. Jingle when he came upon him, 
haggard and destitute, herded with the poorest of 
the poor prisoners. There was a Chancery prisoner 
there, who had been in " long enough to have lost 
friends, fortune, home and happiness and to have 
acquired the right of having a room to himself ; " 
and when Mr. Pickwick, for his greater comfort, was 
induced by the turnkey to bargain with this shabby, 
gaunt, cadaverous wretch for the hire of his room, 
and then, with some touch of compunction, begged 
him to consider it his own still, when he wanted to 
rest in quiet, or see any friends who came to visit 
him, this man broke out vehemently into language 
that to some may seem melodramatic, but to me 
seems natural and true, in such circumstances, and 
to speak not for himself only, but for hundreds of 
broken, hopeless creatures who wore their lives out 
uselessly in that accursed place : 

" Friends ! " interposed the man, in a voice which rattled 
in his throat. " If I lay dead at the bottom of the deepest 



IN THE SHADOW OF ST. PAUL'S 217 

mine in the world, tight screwed down and soldered in my 
coffin, rotting in the dark and filthy ditch that drags its slime 
along beneath the foundations of this prison, I could not be 
more forgotten or unheeded than I am here. I am a dead 
man — dead to society, without the pity they bestow on those 
whose souls have passed to judgment. Friends to see me ! 
My God ! I have sunk from the prime of life into old age in 
this place, and there is not one to raise his hand above my bed, 
when I lie dead upon it, and say ' It is a blessing he is gone ! ' " 

That was the unutterably damnable state of things 
that showed no sign of coming to an end so long as 
the mass of men were persuaded that they were unfit 
to rule themselves and were humbly contented to be 
ruled by what is still sometimes called " the governing 
class." When I glance over old maps and notice 
that London used to have more prisons in it than 
schools and nearly as many prisons as churches, and 
when I remember that the debtors' prisons were not 
abolished and the rest conducted decently, humanely, 
until the democracy had begun to become articulate 
and to insist on taking a hand in its own control, I 
am incredulous and amused at those arrogant persons 
who tell us that none but the caste which used to 
govern us so disgracefully, and with such unintelligent 
legal juggleries, is competent to make laws, and that 
there is peril in democratic government. I never pass 
along this side of Farringdon Street without recalling 
that old prison, and the cry of that man who sym- 
bolised so many thousands of wasted lives that 
withered in it. Look up the byways that run in to 
where once were the prison walls or over what was 
once the prison ground — they are all blind alleys, 
and are bleak and shadowed, on summer noons when 



218 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Farringdon Street is flooded with sunlight, as if here, 
as in Clink Street, the gloom of the old prison hangs 
over the spot even yet and some sense of the intoler- 
able wrong and suffering that have been endured here 
rose from the very earth, like an exhalation from the 
past, and could not be forgotten. 






CHAPTER X 

FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 

IT may seem impossible to write of Fleet Street 
and say nothing of Dr. Johnson and his friends, 
or of the Temple without saying something of Charles 
Lamb, but we are going to come as near to doing that 
as we can. With these and other such realities we 
have really no business here, and there are far more 
of our imaginary people connected with both places 
than I could hope to introduce within the compass 
of this chapter. I shall not attempt to even cata- 
logue all such who have gone up and down the street, 
but I seldom pass the pawnshop next door to Racquet 
Court without recalling that the hero of Christie 
Murray's fine novel, Rainbow Gold, loitered outside 
it gazing in at its window ; or Shoe Lane without 
recollecting that Dickens brings a busload of mis- 
cellaneous characters up Fleet Street, in the Sketches 
by Boz, dropping one at the Lane, and another at 
Farringdon Street, on the way to the Bank ; Mr. 
Puff, in Foote's farce, The Patron, reproaching the 
hack journalist, Dactyl, with ingratitude, cries, " You, 
you ! What, I suppose you forget your garret in 
Wine Office Court, when you furnished paragraphs 
for the Farthing Post at twelve pence a dozen ! " 
and Timothy Capias, in The Minor, another of Foote's 
farces, is one of a club that meets every Tuesday 

219 



220 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



night at the " Magpye and Horse-Shoe, Fetter Lane." 
Pendennis was often in Fleet Street ; Mr. Theodore 
Bragge, of Besant's Seamy Side, had a weakness for 
" exchanging ideas on current politics with a friend 
in a Fleet Street tavern ; " Dickens was writing of 
Johnson's Court, where the Old Monthly Magazine 
was published, when he told of how " stealthily one 
evening at twilight, with fear and trembling," he 
dropped his first published story, " Mr. Minns and 
his Cousin," into " a dark letter-box in a dark office 
up a dark court in Fleet Street ; " and nearly opposite 
is Pleydell Court, into which Dickens walked nightly, 
after he had become famous and was founding the 
Daily News ; and all along Fleet Street came the old 
Poet, Mr. Indagine (who was, I confess, a bit of a 
bore) revisiting the haunts of his youth, with Althea, 
in The Bell of St. Paul's : 

" ' Fleet Street at last ! ' he cried, lifting his head 
and looking round him. c We are in Fleet Street ! 
. . . And now my old friends must be all eighty years 
of age — eighty years of age ! ' . . . But he continued 
to look about him as if it were quite on the cards that 
he might meet Dickens, Thackeray and Douglas 
Jerrold marching arm in arm together, jovial and 
hearty still, though eighty years of age. ' My dear,' 
he said, ' this is a street of Taverns, all sacred to the 
memory of England's Worthies. There are the Cock, 
the Cheshire Cheese, the Rainbow, the Mitre, Dick's — 
once there was the Devil as well, but they pulled it down 
a hundred years ago. Cruel ! To destroy the Apollo 
Chamber, the Kingdom of Ben Jonson.' " But one 
might continue in this style almost endlessly, so let us 
make an end of such casual jottings and start afresh. 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 221 

Up the second turning on your left in Fleet Street 
is St. Bride's Church ; Milton lived in one of the 
houses round the churchyard, and Lovelace was 
buried in the church ; and here Gissing laid a scene 
of his most poignant, most depressing short story, 
" The Day of Silence," in Human Odds and Ends. 
The Burdens lived in a court by Southwark Bridge, 
and a Saturday came when the father went with the 
little son, Billy, boating up the river with some 
friends, while the mother, who was dying of heart 
disease, went to help at a job of cleaning out some 
offices in an alley off Fleet Street near St. Bride's. 
Having finished her work ; never dreaming that there 
had been an accident on the river and neither her 
husband nor her boy would ever return to their home 
— " She came out into St. Bride's Churchyard, and 
was passing on towards Fleet Street when again the 
anguishing spasm seized upon her. She turned and 
looked at the seats under the wall of the church, 
where two or three people were resting in the shadowed 
quiet. It would be better to sit here for a moment. 
Her weak and weary limbs bore her with difficulty 
to the nearest bench, and she sank upon it with a 
sigh. The pain lasted only a minute or two, and in 
the relief that followed she was glad to breathe the 
air of the little open space, where she could look up 
at the blue sky and enjoy the sense of repose. The 
places of business round about were still vacant and 
closed till Monday morning. Only a dull sound of 
traffic came from the great thoroughfare, near at 
hand as it was. And the wonderful sky made her 
think of little Billy who was enjoying himself on the 
river. . . . They would get back about eight o'clock, 



222 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

most likely. Billy would be hungry ; he must have 
a bit of something for supper — fried liver, or perhaps 
some stewed steak. It was time for her to be moving 
on. She stood up, but the movement brought on 
another attack. Her body sank together, her head 
fell forwards. Presently the man who was sitting on 
the next bench began to look at her ; he smiled — 
another victim of the thirsty weather ! And half an 
hour passed before it was discovered that the woman 
sitting there in the shadow of St. Bride's Church was 
dead." 

Whitefriars Street slopes down to the river through 
the centre of a district that once held a Carmelite 
Monastery and its gardens ; by the time of James I. 
the Monastery was gone, but the area that had be- 
longed to it retained its ancient right of sanctuary 
and was a secure retreat for debtors, highwaymen, 
cutpurses and all the blackguards of the town who 
went in danger of the law. Here, again, the dis- 
reputable character that the place bore so long con- 
tinues to assert itself. There is a hangdog, dingy, 
dissipated air about Whitefriars Street that is curiously 
at variance with the respectability of most of its 
buildings ; there are mean little shops that seem at 
home there, and its furtive, shabby, gloomy alleys 
and courts are the actual courts that wormed their 
crooked ways through the Elizabethan and Jacobean 
Alsatia, which lay all along here behind Fleet Street 
between the Temple and the city wall. The chief 
interest now of Shadwell's comedy, The Squire of 
Alsatia, is that it realistically reproduces much of that 
picturesque, riotous region, and the habits, manners 
and queer slang of its inhabitants. His characters 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 223 

include Cheatly, " a rascal who by reason of debts 
dare not stir out of Whitefriars, but there inveigles 
young heirs in tail, and helps them to goods and 
money upon great disadvantages ; is bound for them, 
and shares with them, till he undoes them. A lewd, 
impudent, debauched fellow, very expert in the cant 
about the town ; " Sham well, " cousin to the Bel- 
fonds, an heir, who being ruined by Cheatly, is made 
a -decoy-duck for others ; not daring to stir out of 
Alsatia, where he lives ; " Captain Hackum, " a block- 
headed bully of Alsatia ; a cowardly, impudent, 
blustering fellow ; formerly a sergeant in Flanders, 
run from his colours, retreated into Whitefriars for a 
very small debt, where by the Alsatians, he is dubbed 
a captain ; " Mrs. Hackum, who lets lodgings ; Parson, 
" an indebted Alsatian divine ; " and various other 
gamblers, cheats, thieves, and rapscallions ; to say 
nothing of Sir William and Sir Edward Belfond, and 
the ne'er-do-weel son of Sir William, whose scandalous 
way of life brings his father and others into the law- 
less, frowsily romantic haunts of Whitefriars in 
search of him ; and you can track him and them 
here a little to this day. Scrapewell, a hypocritical, 
godly knave who lives by swindling young heirs, 
telling young Belfond how very drunk he was the 
night before, says, " Why, you broke windows ; 
scoured ; broke open a house in Dorset Court, and 
took a pretty wench, a gentleman's natural, away by 
force," and later you learn that this outrage has been 
put upon Belfond's blameless younger brother, who 
has been arrested for it. "He denied that outrage 
in Dorset Court," says his indignant father, " yet he 
committed it, and was last night hurried before the 



224 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Lord Chief Justice for it." Well, here is still Dorset 
Street, the successor of Dorset Court, a little east of 
Whitefriars Street, mounting into Salisbury Square. 
All through the comedy, this elder son is playing into 
the hands of the bullies of Alsatia, swaggering " in 
and about Whitefriars with Cheatly, and that gang 
of rogues ; " he lodges among them ; revels and dices 
and squanders his money with them at the villainous 
George Tavern ; and when his younger brother comes 
into the place to reason with him, he excuses himself 
for not having called on his family sooner by saying 
he would not disgrace them by coming before his 
new equipage was ready, but he has it now and in- 
tended visiting them to-morrow, and incontinently 
asks his valet : "Is my coach at the gate next to the 
Green Dragon ? " And I like to assume that the 
Green Dragon just round the corner in Fleet Street, 
is the lineal descendant of the one he referred to. It 
was in the George that Sir William Belfond ran his 
erring son to earth : " As I told you," he says to his 
brother, Sir Edward, " when I found that the rogue 
was with his wicked associates at the George, in 
Whitefriars ; when they saw I was resolved to see my 
son, and was rough with 'em, Cheatly and his rogues 
set up a cry against me, ' An arrest ! A bailiff ! an 
arrest ! ' The mobile, and all the rakehells in the 
house and there about the street assembled : I ran, 
and they had a fair course after me into Fleet Street. 
Thanks to the vigor I have left, my heels saved my 
life I " He goes again, this time with a Tipstaff, the 
constable and his watchmen ; and " the posse of the 
Friars " draw up to oppose him, and " cry out ' An 
arrest ! ' Several flock to them with all sorts of 



milk 



iJiPlsife 



MiP^ 




. -—-' "*" Y1alpol£J1ous<s- 

Chisw/ck. M/U.L 
FtedyUcock - 

0^ M* iT/a//, £y M*? Thames, stands Walpole House, which is Miss Pinkertoris 
Academy, in ' Vanity Fair.' " 

Chapter 12 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 225 

weapons ; women with fire-forks, spits, faring-shovels, 
&c." The rabble beat the constable, his men bolt 
and escape from Alsatia through one of the gates into 
the Temple, and Sir William is captured, but his 
younger son comes in time to his rescue through the 
same gateway, with " several gentlemen, Porter of 
the Temple, and Belfond's footmen/' The tables are 
turned, the mob beaten off, and Cheatly, Shamwell 
and Hackum carried prisoners into the Temple, the 
Porter being ordered to " shut the gates into White- 
friars/' when they are through. Possibly that gate 
was the one at the end of Tudor Street, which opens 
into King's Bench Walk. All through the play there 
is rascality, revelry and rioting going on in White- 
friars Street and the tangled maze of slums, courts 
and alleys that lie about it, the sound of a horn in 
the street calling the reckless outlaws together when- 
ever any one of their number is threatened with arrest, 
or the sheriffs invade the quarter in search of one who 
has no right of sanctuary. 

Shadwell gives you a more intimate and vivid 
picture of this Alsatia than you get even from Scott's 
Fortunes of Nigel. When Nigel incurred the dis- 
pleasure of the King by his affray with Lord Dalgarno 
near the Palace, in St. James's Park, and the officers 
were in pursuit of him, he sought temporary seclusion 
in Whitefriars. The residents in the Temple them- 
selves occasionally fled for safety into Alsatia, when 
they were in debt and the bailiffs after them, and one 
of these residents, Master Lowestoffe, befriended 
Nigel, took him to his chambers, lent him a shabbier 
suit, to avoid suspicion, and conducted him into 
Whitefriars by one of the Temple gates, — and he, too, 



226 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

had his adventures at the infamous George tavern, 
and in these sly alleys and byways, but I shall quote 
no more than Scott's strongly realised vision of what 
Nigel saw on his first coming in : 

" The ancient Sanctuary at Whitefriars lay considerably 
lower than the elevated terraces and gardens of the Temple, 
and was therefore generally involved in the damps and fogs 
arising from the Thames. The brick buildings, by which 
it was occupied, crowded closely on each other, for, in a place 
so rarely privileged, every foot of ground was valuable ; but 
erected in many cases by persons whose funds were inadequate 
to their speculations, the houses were generally insufficient, 
and exhibited the lamentable signs of having become ruinous 
while they were yet new. The wailing of children, the scolding 
qj their mothers, the miserable exhibition of ragged linens 
hung from the windows to dry, spoke the wants and distresses 
of the wretched inhabitants ; while the sounds of complaint 
were mocked and overwhelmed in the riotous shouts, oaths, 
and profane songs and boisterous laughter that issued from the 
alehouses and taverns which, as the signs indicated, were 
equal in number to all the other houses ; and, that the full 
character of the place might be evident, several faded, tinselled 
and painted females looked boldly at the strangers from their 
open lattices, or more modestly seemed busied with the cracked 
flower-pots, filled with mignonette and rosemary, which were 
disposed in front of the windows to the great risk of the 
passengers." 

If you wander about Whitefriars Street, Dorset 
Street, Salisbury Square (in which Shadwell and, 
later, Samuel Richardson lived), Magpie Alley, Primrose 
Hill, Wilderness Lane, Temple Lane, and, especially, 
Hanging-Sword Alley, you may realise something of 
the geography and atmosphere of that squalidly 
romantic Alsatia. You approach Magpie Alley and 
Hanging-Sword Alley by flights of steps, but those into 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 227 

Hanging-Sword Alley are the narrower, steeper and 
higher ; at the foot of them is an ancient tavern, The 
Harrow, which has a fascinatingly brooding and mys- 
terious-looking back window and door round the corner 
on Primrose Hill ; and the Alley itself, at the top of 
the steps, is long, dim, very narrow and uneven, and 
still wears much such a secret, shabbily rakish air as 
it must have worn when the bullies and outlaws of 
Alsatia lounged and gossiped, wrangled and duelled 
in it, or tore pell-mell along it and down the steps, 
at the sound of the horn, to join their motley comrades 
in repelling some invasion of the sheriffs. Why Scott 
made no use of this, the most bizarre of Alsatian 
remains, I do not know ; Ainsworth introduces it 
into one of his highly-coloured romances of the long 
past ; but, better than that, Dickens brings it into 
his early nineteenth century story, A Tale of Two 
Cities. Jerry Cruncher, the odd job man and occa- 
sional porter who used to stand outside Tellson's 
Bank, which was just within Temple Bar in Fleet 
Street, had " private lodgings in Hanging-Sword Alley, 
Whitefriars. . . . Mr. Cruncher's apartments were 
not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were but two 
in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass 
in it might be counted as one." The Alley is largely 
a place of back windows, but along one side is a rather 
high, blind wall with dark little doors in it, and you 
may depend that one of these few doors was Jerry's, 
and he went in by it to those apartments in which he 
was continually protesting against Mrs. Cruncher's 
habit of " flopping " in prayer for him, because she 
could not reconcile herself to his unholy business of 
body-snatching. In one of his two apartments Mr. 



228 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 






Cruncher sat up one night preparing for one of these 
excursions to a churchyard ; he sat smoking until 
one o'clock, which was his time for starting. " Towards 
that small and ghostly hour, he rose up from his chair, 
took a key from his pocket, opened a locked cupboard, 
and brought forth a sack, a crowbar of convenient 
size, a rope and chain, and other fishing tackle of that 
nature. Disposing these articles about him in skilful 
manner, he bestowed a parting glance of defiance on 
Mrs. Cruncher, extinguished the light and went out/' 
Young Jerry, his son, curious as to the object of these 
midnight outings, had only made a feint of undressing 
when he went to bed ; now, '* under cover of the 
darkness he followed out of the room, followed down 
the stairs, followed down the court, followed out into 
the streets." As Mr. Cruncher went northwards, you 
may take it they did not go down the steps at the 
lower end of the alley, but flitted up it, under the part 
that is arched over by business premises, and round 
the bend to where it opens on the higher level of 
Whitefriars Street. Mr. George, in Bleak House, 
coming from his shooting-gallery near Leicester 
Square, walked down the Strand, through " the 
cloisterly Temple, and by Whitefriars (there, not 
without a glance at Hanging-Sword Alley, which 
would seem to be something in his way), by Black- 
friars Bridge and Blackfriars Road," to the shop now 
kept by that other old soldier, Matthew Bagnet, in 
the neighbourhood of the Elephant and Castle. 

Tellson's Bank was another name for Child's Bank, 
which has been rebuilt on the same spot since Temple 
Bar was demolished. Jerry sat waiting for custom 
outside it on a stool ; he was sitting there when the 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 229 

funeral procession of Roger Cly, the Old Bailey spy, 
came up Fleet Street ; young Jerry was with him and 
stood on the stool to see the sight, but old Jerry joined 
the disorderly mob that after commencing to drag 
the coffin out of the hearse, altered its mind, swarmed 
into the mourning-coaches, and joyously and up- 
roariously added itself to the procession. 

Opposite Childs', a branch of the Bank of England 
occupies the site of the Cock Tavern ; Pepys once 
took Mrs. Knipp, the actress to it, but it is better re- 
membered as a favourite haunt of Tennyson's, who 
addressed his Will Waterproof's Monologue to the 

plump head-waiter at the Cock 
To which I most resort. 

That side, between the Cock and Chancery Lane, 
stood the house of Izaak Walton. But we have come 
too far up the street and must go back to St. 
Dunstan's Church, not because Dr. Donne used to 
preach in its predecessor, but because on the pave- 
ment outside that predecessor Trotty Veck, of The 
Chimes, used to stand, as a ticket porter, waiting for 
people to engage him ; and because David Ramsay, 
maker of watches and horologues to his Majesty 
James I., as you will know if you have read The 
Fortunes of Nigel, used to " keep open shop within 
Temple Bar, a few yards to the eastward of Saint 
Dunstan's Church : 

" The shop of a London tradesman of that time, as it may- 
be supposed, was something very different from those we now 
see in the same locality. The goods were exposed for sale in 
cases, only defended from the weather by a covering of canvas, 
and the whole resembled the stalls and booths now erected 



230 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

for the temporary accommodation of dealers at a country fair, 
rather than the established emporium of a respectable citizen. 
But most of the shopkeepers of note, and David Ramsay among 
them, had their booth connected with a small apartment which 
opened backward from it, and bore the same resemblance to 
the front shop that Robinson Crusoe's cavern did to the tent 
which he erected before it. To this Master Ramsay was often 
accustomed to retreat to the labour of his abstruse calculations ; 
for he aimed at improvement and discoveries in his own art, 
and sometimes pushed his researches, like Napier and other 
mathematicians of the period, into abstract science. When 
thus engaged, he left the outer posts of his commercial establish- 
ment to be maintained by two stout-bodied and strong- voiced 
apprentices, who kept up the cry of * What d'ye lack ? what 
d'ye lack ? ' accompanied with the appropriate recommendations 
of the articles in which they dealt." 

When Kate, in Webster's Northward Ho ! asks 
Featherstone, " Doth my husband do any things 
about London ? doth he swagger ? " he assures her 
that her husband is " as tame as a fray in Fleet Street 
when there are nobody to part them ; " and you may 
gather some notion of what this means from Scott's 
pictures of the wild rights between the 'prentices 
and the Templars or the citizens, in which combats 
David Ramsay's two 'prentices took their fair share. 
There was traffic between Ramsay's pretty daughter 
Margaret and Mistress Suddlechops, wife of the noted 
barber whose shop was also in Fleet Street, and to 
Ramsay's premises by St. Dunstan's came Nigel, 
Master Heriot, and many another who had to do 
with Nigel's varying fortunes. 

Across the road again, a little beyond the Middle 
Temple gateway, stood the Devil Tavern where Ben 
Jonson's famous club held its meetings in the Apollo 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 231 

room ; he lays a scene of his Staple of News in the 
same room of that tavern ; and, to say nothing of 
many a more and less glorious happening there, it 
was in the Apollo room that Randolph was first 
introduced to his Master and, " sworn of the tribe 
of Ben," went away to write " A gratulatory to Master 
Ben Jonson, for his adopting of him to be his son." 

. . . And to say truth, that which is best in me 
May call you father ; 'twas begot by thee. 
Have I a spark of that celestial flame 
Within me ? I confess I stole the same, 
Prometheus-like, from thee ; and may I feed 
His vulture when I dare deny the deed. 
Many more moons thou hast, that shine by night, 
All bankrupts, were't not for a borrowed light, 
Yet can forswear it ; I the debt confess, 
And think my reputation none the less. 

I will sooner forgive the removal of Temple Bar than 
the ruthless sweeping away of a place so sacred as the 
Devil Tavern ; it ought never to have been pulled 
down ; and it is a poor consolation to know that the 
black board on which the rules of Jonson's club are 
inscribed, and the bust of Apollo that stood over the 
door of his room and gave it its name are still pre- 
served in Child's Bank. 

Eugene Wrayburn, of Our Mutual Friend, shared 
chambers in Goldsmith Buildings with Mortimer 
Lightwood. Goldsmith Buildings are in the Temple 
and are entered from Fleet Street through an archway 
that faces Chancery Lane, and coming out by that 
archway one day, after an interview with the two 
lawyers, Mr. Bofhn was jogging along Fleet Street 
when John Rokesmith overtook him, admitted he 



232 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

had been following him, and asked, " Would you 
object to turn aside into this place— I think it is called 
Clifford's Inn — where we can hear one another better 
than in the roaring street ? " And they walked up 
the passage against St. Dunstan's under the arch into 
the Inn, and as Mr. Boffin listened to Rokesmith's 
appeal for employment as his secretary, Mr. Boffin 
" glanced into the mouldy little plantation, or cat 
preserve, of Clifford's Inn, as it was that day, in 
search of a suggestion. Sparrows were there, cats 
were there, dry-rot and wet-rot were there, but it was 
not otherwise a suggestive spot." 

On the terrace, across the other side of this railed-in 
plantation in the middle of Clifford's Inn, stood those 
old Judges' Chambers to which Mr. Perker came 
with Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller, to conduct cer- 
tain proceedings in connection with Mr. Pickwick's 
transfer to the Fleet Prison, but they approached it 
by an arched entrance from Chancery Lane, and this 
entrance and the Judges' Chambers themselves are 
all gone, though they were here within my own 
memory. 

All Chancery Lane is strongly reminiscent of Bleak 
House. Here it is, at the opening of the story, that 
on a densely foggy day, " in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at 
the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chan- 
cellor in his High Court of Chancery ; " and if you go 
in by the old-world gateway out of Chancery Lane, 
across Old Square, which is very old, there still is 
Lincoln's Inn Hall, no longer used as a Law Court. 
To Lincoln's Inn Hall again and again came all those 
harassed suitors concerned in the notorious cause of 
" Jarndyce v. Jarndyce ; " Kenge and Carboy, Mr. 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 233 

Jarndyce's solicitors, had their offices in Old Square, 
and to their offices went Esther Summerson to be 
engaged as companion to Ada Clare, John Jarndyce's 
ward. She met Richard Carstone and Ada there, 
and they all went over into the Hall with Mr. Kenge 
to arrange with the Lord Chancellor about Esther's 
appointment. Afterwards, as Esther, with Ada and 
Richard hesitated under the colonnade of the Hall, 
poor little Miss Flyte, " a curious little old woman in 
a squeezed bonnet, and carrying a reticule, came 
curtseying and smiling up to us, with an air of great 
ceremony," to have the honour of knowing " the 
wards in Jarndyce," she herself being involved in 
endless Chancery proceedings that had unbalanced 
her mind ; and she accompanied them across Old 
Square to the foot of the broad, steep flight of stairs 
that led up into Kenge and Carboy's offices. " We 
passed into sudden quietude under an old gateway," 
so Esther describes her first arrival here, in a cab 
along Chancery Lane, " and drove on through a silent 
square until we came to an odd nook in a corner, where 
there was an entrance up a steep, broad flight of stairs, 
like an entrance to a church. And there really was a 
churchyard, outside under some cloisters, for I saw 
the gravestones from the staircase window." Stand 
in those cloisters now and you can look across at 
Kenge and Carboy's offices. Mr. Guppy and young 
Small weed were clerks in the office, and on a hot day 
in vacation-time, taking a breath of air at the window, 
" looking out into the shade of Old Square, sur- 
veying the intolerable brick and mortar, Mr. Guppy 
becomes conscious of a manly whisker emerging from 
the cloistered walk below and turning itself up in the 



234 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

direction of his face;" the owner of the whisker 
proves to be his friend Mr. Jobling, who stands under 
the window and induces Mr. Guppy to throw him 
down the loan of half a crown. 

Through the cloisters, and you come out into Stone 
Buildings, where Mr. Wharton, the barrister, in 
Trollope's Prime Minister, had his chambers. Stone 
Buildings is formed by two tall rows and an end wall 
of drab stone houses, with steps to their front door- 
ways and wide, railed-in areas before their basements. 
Those on the right back upon Chancery Lane ; Mr. 
Wharton's chambers must have been on the left, and 
at the back, for " he had a large, pleasant room in 
which to sit, looking out from the ground floor of 
Stone Buildings on to the gardens belonging to the 
Inn." High up in Stone Buildings, on the left, and 
at the back too, lived Raymond Pennicuick, of 
James Payn's By Proxy, for he had a window " look- 
ing down on the green." If instead of going out to 
Stone Buildings, you pass from Old Square by Lin- 
coln's Inn Hall, across New Square (where in his boy- 
hood Dickens was employed as a lawyer's clerk), you 
emerge upon the broad open space of Lincoln's Inn 
Fields. Here, in the opening scene of Farquhar's 
Love and a Bottle, the wild, roving Roebuck meets 
with the wealthy young Lucinda and her maid, and 
after some flippant converse, suddenly kisses Lucinda 
and catching her up is carrying her off when, to her 
cries for help, Lovewell and his man dash in, and he 
and Roebuck have drawn their swords and are on 
the verge of fighting a duel, but recognise each other 
as old friends and embrace instead. Again, in Sir 
Harry Wildair Farquhar has a scene in Lincoln's Inn 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 235 

Fields, where Sir Harry is fighting a ludicrous duel 
with Monsieur the Marquis, when Colonel Standard 
and Captain Fireball arrive and part them. Doctor 
Hellebore, in Foote's play, The Cozeners, lives at 
" the third door to the left in Lincoln's Inn Fields ; " 
at No. 55, lived Tennyson ; and at No. 58, John 
Forster, whose house and chambers Dickens described 
as those of Mr. Tulkinghorn, in Bleak House : " Here, 
in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr. 
Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now ; 
and in those shrunken fragments of its greatness, 
lawyers lie like maggots in nuts." Mr. Tulkinghorn 
enters Lincoln's Inn Fields one evening, from Chesney 
Wold, whilst the lamplighter is lighting the lamps, 
and " arrives at his own dull courtyard. He ascends 
the doorsteps and is gliding into the dusky hall, when 
he encounters, on the top step, a bowing and pro- 
pitiatory little man." This is Mr. Snagsby, the law 
stationer, of Took's Court ; talking with whom, Mr. 
Tulkinghorn " leans his arms on the iron railing at 
the top of the steps, and looks at the lamplighter 
lighting the courtyard." By and by, in his room 
upstairs, Mr. Tulkinghorn is to be murdered ; but 
this house's greater interest, after all, is that to it 
came Forster's friends, who included most of the men 
great in art and letters of his day ; and in his room 
here on the 2nd December, 1844, Carlyle, Douglas 
Jerrold, Maclise, Forster, and others gathered to hear 
Dickens read The Chimes before it was published. 

Polly Sparkes of Gissing's Town Traveller, once 
came to keep an appointment with a mysterious 
correspondent in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and waited for 
him in vain " on the quiet pavement shadowed by 



236 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

the College of Surgeons ; " Mr. Wharton and Fletcher, 
in The Prime Minister, dined in Portugal Street, 
Lincoln's Inn Fields, at " a very quaint old-fashioned 
dining-house ; " and I suspect that this was the same 
" quiet house of refreshment in the vicinity of Lincoln's 
Inn Fields " to which Joseph Snowden and Mr. 
Scawthorne, in Gissing's Nether World, came when 
they were plotting together against Joseph's father. 
On the western side of the Fields, in Portsmouth 
Street, is the quaint old shop that confidently pro- 
claims itself as Dickens's original " Old Curiosity 
Shop," but it does not answer to the description of 
the shop in the book, so you may believe it or not, 
as you choose. 

Between the old Lincoln's Inn gateway and Carey 
Street, out of Chancery Lane, is Bishop's Court, one 
of those odd, attenuated byways that old London 
loved ; and at the top of Bishops' Court, a door or 
two round the bend of it and facing the wall of 
Lincoln's Inn, was Krook's Rag and Bottle shop. 
Richard Carstone, Ada, and Esther Summerson went 
there with little Miss Flyte, who lived over it, and 
they lingered outside examining the amazing litter 
of rubbish heaped in the window : 

*' As it was still foggy and dark, and as the shop 
was blinded besides by the wall of Lincoln's Inn, 
intercepting the light within a couple of yards, we 
should not have seen so much but for a lighted lantern 
that an old man in spectacles and a hairy cap was 
carrying about in the shop." Miss Flyte " lived at 
the top of the house in a pretty large room, from which 
she had a glimpse of the roof of Lincoln's Inn Hall." 
A lodger on a lower floor was the mysterious, im- 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 237 

pecunious law-writer known as " Nemo ; " he died 
there, and an inquest was held upon him at a tavern 
a few doors away ; but the tavern vanished from the 
top corner of Chichester Rents a short time ago. The 
newspaper reports of this inquest led Lady Dedlock 
to finding Poor Jo, who had been one of the witnesses, 
at his crossing, and paying him to take her round to 
all the places " Nemo " had been connected with : to 
Mr. Snagsby's, in Took's Court, Cursitor Street ; to 
Krook's shop ; and to that dreadful old graveyard 
in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane where the dead 
man was buried. 

Cursitor Street is on the other side of Chancery 
Lane, nearer to Holborn, and you may still see Took's 
Court in it (which Dickens thinly disguises as Cook's 
Court), and there are three or four dingily respectable 
old Georgian houses near the Cursitor Street end of 
it, one of which was certainly the house in which Mr. 
Snagsby, the law stationer, carried on his business, 
and was visited by Mr. Chadband. 

Out of Carey Street, Bell Yard slopes down into 
Fleet Street again, and it was to an attic over a 
chandler's shop in Bell Yard that Esther Summerson 
went with Mr. Jarndyce and Harold Skimpole to see 
the Coavines children. The lower end of the Yard 
flows into Fleet Street at the point where it joins the 
Strand, and where Temple Bar stood in the days of 
David Copperfield, who came down the Strand with 
Mr. Peggotty, " through Temple Bar, into the City," 
when they were looking for the outcast Martha in 
the hope that she could give them news about the 
lost Little Em'ly ; and in the days when Rawdon 
Crawley, of Vanity Fair, was arrested for debt, and 



238 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

" finished his cigar as the cab drove under Temple 
Bar," carrying him to the sponging house of Mr. Moss, 
which was in Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane ; where 
also was the sponging house with which Coavines 
(otherwise Neckett) of Bell Yard was connected. 

We won't go into the Temple by the Middle Temple 
Lane archway, but by the more eastern arch which 
gives on Goldsmith Buildings where, once upon a 
time, the reader of Our Mutual Friend might, like 
Mr. Boffin, have found the chambers of Mortimer 
Lightfoot and Eugene Wrayburn, if he had " wandered 
disconsolately about the Temple until he stumbled 
on a dismal churchyard, and had looked up at the 
dismal windows commanding that churchyard until 
at the most dismal window of them all he saw a dismal 
boy " — the window being on the second floor, and the 
boy Lightfoot's only clerk. The churchyard, in which 
Goldsmith was buried, is that of the Temple Church, 
at which Captain Face, in Ben Jonson's Alchemist, 
desired Surly, the gambler, to meet him ; and to 
which Pendennis and Clive Newcome went one 
Sunday with Rosey to see the tombs of the Knights 
Templars. Immediately past the Church is Lamb 
Court ; and in Lamb Building Pendennis had chambers 
on the third floor. Major Pendennis sent his man 
Morgan there with a note for Pendennis, and when he 
returned, the Major asked from behind his bed-curtains 
in his lodging in Bury Street, St. James's, " What sort 
of a place is it, Morgan ? " "I should say rayther a shy 
place," said Mr. Morgan. " The lawyers lives there, 
and has their names on the doors. Mr. Harthur lives 
three pair high, sir. Mr. Warrington lives there too, 
sir. . . . Honly saw the outside of the door, sir, 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 239 

with Mr. Warrington's name and Mr. Arthur's painted 
up, and a piece of paper with ' Back at 6 ; ' but I 
couldn't see no servant, sir." "Economical at any 
rate," said the Major. " Very, sir. Three pair, sir. 
Nasty black staircase as ever I see." At different 
times, the old Major, Captain Costigan, and Harry 
Foker climbed these stairs to see them. One evening, 
after Pendennis had resolved that he must break off 
his friendship with little Fanny Bolton, daughter of 
the gatekeeper of Shepherd's Inn (which was really 
Clement's Inn), he happened to meet Fanny and her 
two small sisters with their mother in Temple Gardens ; 
it was a slightly agitated meeting, and he presently 
left them there and returned home. " When the 
gardens were closed, the two women, who had had 
but a melancholy evening's amusement, walked sadly 
away with the children, and they entered into Lamb 
Court and stood under the lamp-post which cheerfully 
ornaments the centre of that quadrangle, and looked 
up to the third floor of the house where Pendennis 's 
chambers were, and where they saw a light presently 
kindled. Then these couple of fools went away, the 
children dragging wearily after them." When Pen- 
dennis was laid up dangerously ill there, Fanny gained 
admission and remained to nurse him, until his mother 
and Laura, the cousin who loved him, came from the 
country, ousted the tearful little nurse resentfully, 
and shared her duties between them. Thereafter, 
when he was convalescent, they had music and singing 
up there in his room or the rooms of a friend on the 
floor below, and " I wonder how that poor pale little 
girl in the black bonnet, who used to stand at the 
lamp-post in Lamb Court sometimes of an evening, 



240 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

looking up at the open windows from which the music 
came, liked to hear it ? ... At last, after about ten 
days of this life, one evening when the little spy of 
the court came out to take her usual post of observa- 
tion at the lamp, there was no music from the second- 
floor window, there were no lights in the third story 
chambers, the windows of each were open, and the 
occupants were gone. Mrs. Flanagan, the laundress, 
told Fanny what had happened. The ladies and all 
the party had gone to Richmond for change of air." 

South of Lamb Building, down the steps and under 
the Temple Library, and you are out, with, on your 
right, Crown Office Row, where Lamb was born, the 
Temple Gardens facing you, and on your left King's 
Bench Walk, and, nearer, Paper Buildings, where 
Sydney Carton used to work, in the chambers of Mr. 
Stryver ; and in Paper Buildings lived Sir John 
Chester, of Barnaby Rudge, and breakfasted in bed 
one morning, able to see " through the half opened 
window, the Temple Garden," and the dome of St. 
Paul's ; for Temple Garden stretches all along beside 
and behind Paper Buildings. Shakespeare, with 
warrant from history, places a scene of Henry VI. in 
the Temple Garden, and brings the partizans of York 
and Lancaster into it to continue a dispute as to 
the right of succession that had begun between them 
in the Temple Hall : 

Plantagenet. Great lords and gentlemen, what means this 
silence ? 
Dare no man answer in a case of truth ? 

Suffolk. Within the Temple hall we were too loud ; 
The garden here is more convenient. 

Plantagenet. Then say at once if I maintained the truth, 







S 



«'.'w ,.V;' 



!:t': 5 ;\'.',:5Ai-vJ^ 






7^4- Spaniards ■ J/amps toad - 

fj-om. Me CJAZDCJi - 
Fred*- Ad cock ■ 

" itfrj. Bardell, of ' Pickwick,' went with Master Bardell and a party of friends to 
take the air and have refreshment in the pleasant tea-garden of ' The Spaniards. 

Chapter ij 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 241 

Or else was wrangling Somerset in the error ? . . . 
Since you are tongue-tied and so loath to speak, 
In dumb significants proclaim your thoughts : 
Let him that is a true-born gentleman 
And stands upon the honour of his birth, 
If he suppose that I have pleaded truth, 
From off this brier pluck a white rose with me. 

Somerset. Let him that is no coward nor no flatterer, 
But dare maintain the party of the truth, 
Pluck a red rose from off this thorn with me. 

Warwick. I love no colours, and without all colour 
Of base insinuating flattery, 
I pluck this white rose with Plantagenet 

Suffolk. I pluck this red rose with young Somerset, 
And say withal I think he held the right. . . . 

Warwick. ... I prophesy, this brawl to-day, 
Grown to this faction in the Temple Garden, 
Shall send between the red rose and the white 
A thousand souls to death and deadly night. 

" Fashion has long deserted the green and pretty Temple 
Garden, in which Shakespeare makes York and Lancaster to 
pluck the innocent white and red roses which became the 
badges of their bloody wars," writes Thackeray in Pendennis. 
| . . . Only antiquarians and literary amateurs care to 
look at the gardens with much interest, and fancy good Sir 
Roger de Coverley and Mr. Spectator with his short face pacing 
up and down the road ; or dear Oliver Goldsmith, in the 
summer-house, perhaps, meditating about the next ' Citizen 
of the World.' . . . Treading heavily on the gravel, and 
rolling majestically along in a snuff-coloured suit, and a wig 
that sadly wants the barber's powder and irons, one sees the 
Great Doctor step up to him (his Scotch lackey following at 
the lexicographer's heels, a little the worse for port wine that 
they had been taking at the Mitre) and Mr. Johnson asks Mr. 
Goldsmith to come home and take a dish of tea with him. 
Kind faith of Fancy ! Sir Roger and Mr. Spectator aref as 
real to us now as the two doctors and the boozy and faithful 
16 



242 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Scotchman. The poetical figures live in our memory just 
as much as the real personages — and as Mr. Arthur Pendennis 
was of a romantic and literary turn, by no means addicted 
to the legal pursuits common in the neighbourhood of the 
place, we may presume that he was cherishing some such 
poetical reflections as these, when, upon the evening after the 
events recorded in the last chapter, the young gentleman 
chose the Temple Gardens as a place for exercise and 
meditations." 

And there met Fanny Bolton, with her sisters and 
mother, as we have seen already. Both Goldsmith, 
and, later, Thackeray, lived at 2 Brick Court ; and at 
the extreme western end of the Garden, Pip and 
Herbert Pocket, of Great Expectations, shared chambers 
" at the top of the last house " in Garden Court, and 
thither and up the dark staircase to those rooms 
went Abel Magwitch, the returned convict, that black 
and rainy night when he disclosed the fact that he 
was Pip's secret benefactor, and was hurt that the 
disclosure should humilitate Pip and horrify him. 
Up the steps from Garden Court, and you are in 
Fountain Court, which is close by the beautiful old 
Hall of the Temple, in which Shakespeare is said to 
have read A Midsummer Night's Dream to Queen 
Elizabeth, at one of the Benchers' stately festivals. 
After Mr. Pecksniff had discharged Tom Pinch, and 
he was cataloguing books in one of the dimmest courts 
of the Temple, and residing out Islington way, with 
his sister Ruth to keep house for him, " there was a 
little plot between them that Tom should always come 
out of the Temple by one way ; and that was past 
the fountain. Coming through Fountain Court, he 
was just to glance down the steps leading into Garden 



FLEET STREET AND THE TEMPLE 243 

Court, and to look once all round him ; and if Ruth 
had come to meet him, there he would see her." 
Once, as she lingered there, she caught sight of John 
Westlock, and in a panic of shyness ran off down the 
steps, but John followed and "overtook her in the 
sanctuary of Garden Court," and they waited until 
Tom joined them, and then all walked home together ; 
and you may know they went by Middle Temple 
Lane, because it is recorded that Tom made a joke, 
and stopped under the arch of Temple Bar to laugh. 
Ruth and John Westlock came to the Fountain by 
themselves on the day John told her that he loved 
her, and stopping there " it was quite natural — nothing 
could be more so — that they should glance down 
Garden Court ; because Garden Court ends in the 
Garden, and the Garden ends in the river, and that 
glimpse is very bright and fresh and shining on a 
summer day." 

The Garden does not end in the river now, because 
the Embankment has been built between them and 
stretches from Blackfriars Bridge, in a stony corner 
against which poor Jo, of Bleak House, sat to gnaw 
at the broken meats Mr. Snagsby had given him, 
" looking up at the great Cross on the summit of St. 
Paul's Cathedral/' and ends at Westminster Bridge, 
having on its river-edge, almost midway between the 
two Bridges, the worn, cryptic Cleopatra's Needle 
guarded by the figure of the Sphinx that set Robert 
Buchanan dreaming : 

Not on the desert sands, with lions roaring around her, 

Seeking their timid prey in pools of the bright moonrise, 
But here by the glimmering Thames, in silence of dreams 
profounder, 



244 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Crouches the Shape of Stone, wingSd, with wondrous 

eyes. . . . 
Ancient of days, she was crouching like this ere Christ was 

created, 
Watching the things that are fled, seeing the things that are 

fated. . . . 



CHAPTER XI 

THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 

LAMB loved " the pavements of the motley Strand, 
crowded with to and fro passengers," especially 
after its lamps were lit : so he wrote to Robert Lloyd, 
and in one of his minor essays he says, " often, when 
I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I 
rushed out into the crowded Strand and fed my 
humour, till the tears have wetted my cheek for un- 
utterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving 
picture which she never fails to present at all hours, 
like the scenes of a shifting pantomime." " Is any 
night-walk comparable," he asks in a letter to Manning, 
" to a walk from St. Paul's to Charing Cross ? " And 
writing to Wordsworth of his love for London and his 
walks at night about her teeming streets, he says, " I 
often shed tears in the Strand from fulness of joy in 
so much life." Dr. Johnson agreed with Bos well 
that Fleet Street always had " a very animated 
appearance, but," he added, " I think the full tide 
of human existence is at Charing Cross." 

Could they return to it, they would find the char- 
acter of the Strand unchanged in these respects, so it 
is fitting everyway that it should also be more crowded 
with imaginary people than any other street in London. 
Most of it has been widened ; Butcher Row, which 
had a coffee-shop that Johnson used to frequent, has 

245 



246 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

been replaced by the Law Courts, but it retains yet 
a few of its old houses, and some of its ancient by- 
ways, such as Devereux Court, Strand Lane, and the 
steep, narrow George Court that you enter down a 
flight of steps. Ralph, in Beaumont and Fletcher's 
Knight of the Burning Pestle, was " 'prentice to a 
grocer in the Strand " ; he appears in one scene 
dressed as a May-lord and singing : 

And by the common counsel of my fellows in the Strand, 
With gilded staff, and crossed scarf, the May-lord here I 
stand. 

That was when a may-pole stood in the Strand, 
opposite Somerset House, before St. Mary-le-Strand 
was built there. All the scenes of Shirley's Lady of 
Pleasure are laid in the Strand, mostly in the houses 
of Sir Thomas Born well, or of Celestina, a young 
widow, who rebukes her Steward when he would 
check her extravagance : 

My entertainments shall 
Be oftener, and more rich. Who shall control me ? 
I live i' the Strand, whither few ladies come 
To live, and purchase more than fame. I will 
Be hospitable, then, and spare no cost 
That may engage all generous report 
To trumpet forth my bounty and my bravery, 
Till the Court envy, and remove. I'll have 
My house the academy of wits, who shall 
Exalt their genius with rich sack and sturgeon, 
Write panegyrics of my feasts, and praise 
The method of my witty superfluities. 
The horses shall be taught, with frequent waiting 
Upon my gates, to stop in their career 
Toward Charing Cross, spite of the coachman's fury : 
And not a tilter but shall strike his plume, 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 247 

When he sails by my window ; my balcony 
Shall be the courtier's idol, and more gazed at 
Than all the pageantry at Temple Bar 
By country clients. 

The carriages and the tilters going by towards Charing 
Cross would be on their way to the Court, which was 
then at Whitehall. Master Heriot rode that way on 
his mule, in The Fortunes of Nigel, past the lordly 
mansions of the Strand, past Charing Cross, " which 
was no longer the pleasant solitary village at which 
the judges were wont to breakfast on their way to 
Westminster Hall," and so round to the Palace of 
James I, in Whitehall. If you have read The Heart 
of Midlothian, you will know that when Jeanie Deans 
came to London she stayed with her friend Mrs. Glass, 
who kept a fashionable snuff-shop in the Strand ; and 
in the Strand lived Miss La Creevy — the miniature 
painter : Mrs. Nickleby, with Nicholas and Kate, 
lodged with her there when they first came up from 
the country. 

All up and down the Strand go the people of 
Gissing's Town Traveller, In the Year of Jubilee, The 
Nether World, and The Unclassed. Ida Starr, in The 
Unclassed, brought Wymark with her one evening 
from under the Pall Mall colonnade, to her home. 
" She led the way into the Strand. At no great 
distance from Temple Bar she turned into a small 
court." This was Thanet Place ; it was a cul de sac, 
a blank wall at the end shutting it off from the Temple, 
and its two rows of trim neat houses, with creepers 
growing over them, with their small-paned windows, 
the two white steps before their little green, brass- 
knockered front doors, looked like a quiet old street 



248 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



in some little country town. A London book pub- 
lished last year tells us that Thanet Place is still there, 
but its entrance is so narrow that nearly everybody 
passes without noticing it. I knew it very well, but 
it was wiped out some years ago ; if it is still there 
I am one of those who are unable to find it, or we 
would go there, for Wymark went so frequently, and 
some of the most poignant things in Gissing's book 
happened in Ida Starr's obscure, small dwelling there. 
When Jack, in Foote's Lame Lover, is recommending 
Charles Woodford to his sister, he assures her that 
" Mrs Congo, at the Grecian coffee-house, says he's 
the soberest youth that comes to the house." If you 
go up Devereux Court, also opposite the Law Courts, 
you may see all that is left of the Grecian — the bust 
of Lord Devereux stands above its door, as it stood 
above the door of the house when Addison and Steele 
and their friends frequented it. Across the road, 
beside the Law Courts, is a remnant of Clement's Inn, 
a small and mangled remnant, all unlike the Clement's 
Inn of old houses and pleasant gardens of which Fanny 
Bolton's father was one of the gatekeepers ; and all 
unlike the Clement's Inn that was known to Falstaff 
and Justice Shallow. " I was once of Clement's 
Inn," Shallow boasts to his cousin Silence ; " where 
I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet ; " he re- 
minds Falstaff, when the fat knight comes to him for 
recruits, of the cunning little fellow he had seen 
fencing at Mile End Green, in the old days when he 
" lay at Clement's Inn ; " and still bragging of the 
wild life he lived there he sighs, " Ha ! cousin Silence, 
that thou hads't seen that that this knight and I 
have seen. Ha ! Sir John, said I well ? " " We 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 249 

have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow," 
Falstaff answers darkly, but to Bardolph he subse- 
quently confides, " Lord, Lord ! how subject we old 
men are to this vice of lying. This same starved 
justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the 
wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about 
Turnbull Street ; and every third word a lie, duer 
paid to the hearer than the Turks tribute. I do 
remember him at Clement's Inn like a man made 
after supper of a cheese-paring." 

In the middle of the road, before Clement's Inn, 
is the Church of St. Clement Danes. They were not the 
chimes of this church that Falstaff and Shallow had 
heard at midnight, for it was rebuilt in the seventeenth 
century ; but there has been a church here since the 
eleventh century ; and this present church is the one 
at which Dr. Johnson was a regular attendant, and 
his pew is to be seen within it. Clement's Inn spread 
over much of the ground that is covered by Aldwich ; 
Mr. Gudge, of Albert Smith's Christopher Tadpole, 
had his chambers in a court in the heart of it, one end 
of which was " entirely taken up with a large hall, 
with steps, and a door, and such a knocker ! evidently 
intended for the use of some ogre residing there, who 
lives entirely upon broiled clients, garnished with 
fricassed indentures." He describes the garden, with 
the ornaments adorning it, that are " compromises 
between monumental urns and fancy flower-pots. 
The figure in the middle is the greatest compromise 
of all. The original artist evidently conceived a great 
idea, but got hazy in his mind as to the proper way of 
carrying it out ; and so, vaccilating feebly between a 
statue and a fountain and a sun-dial, he effected a 



250 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

compromise between all three. As it is, the figure is 
typical of the intelligent negro, who, crouching down 
in an attitude of supplication, whilst he balances a 
sun-dial on his head — in the infantile attitude of ' hot 
pies ' — implies that although he is a man and a brother, 
he is quite up to the time of day." This one authentic 
relic of the old Clement's Inn still survives, and you 
may see it where it has been re-erected in Temple 
Garden. 

Aldwych also replaces Holywell Street, and Wych 
Street, where you find Jack Sheppard, in Ains worth's 
romance, serving his apprenticeship ; but if you walk 
round Aldwych you will still come to Drury Lane, 
where Dick Swiveller lodged over a tobacconist's, 
involved in monetary difficulties which he explained to 
Fred Trent, when Fred called upon him there. He 
sent out to order dinner in for both of them, and 
afterwards made a careful note in his pocket-book, 
remarking, in response to Fred's sneer at his ostenta- 
tion of business : "I enter in this little book the 
names of the streets that I can't go down while the 
shops are open. This dinner to-day closes Long Acre. 
I bought a pair of boots in Queen Street last week, 
and made that no thoroughfare too. There's only 
one avenue to the Strand left open now, and I shall 
have to stop up that to-night with a pair of gloves. 
The roads are closing so fast in every direction that, 
in about a month's time, unless my aunt sends me a 
remittance, I shall have to go three or four miles out 
of town to get over the way." 

Back in the Strand, on the other side of St. Clement's 
church, are Essex Street and Norfolk Street ; in 
Essex Street Dr. Johnson had one of his many clubs 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 251 

at the Essex Head, and Charley Tudor, a clerk at 
Somerset House, in Trollope's Three Clerks, " had his 
house of call in a cross lane running between Essex 
Street and Norfolk Street." He was in and out of 
the place a good deal, and foolishly became affianced 
to the barmaid there. Trollope calls it " The Cat 
and Whistle," but I am inclined to think it was the 
Old Cheshire Cheese, an old tavern, in a cross 
lane between Essex Street and Norfolk Street, that 
no writer on London ever says anything about. 
Higher up the Strand is Somerset House, where 
Charley Tudor was a clerk, and where Mr. Minns, of 
Dickens's first story, Mr. Minns and his Cousin, was 
a clerk before him. But long before either of them, 
in the days of Charles II, Pepys was a frequent visitor 
at Somerset House, when the Queen Mother had her 
palace there ; and a decade or so before Pepys went 
there, when it was Queen Henrietta Maria's dower 
house, Randolph walked in its grounds, 

Where glittering courtiers in their tissues stalked, 

and witnessed an incident which he describes in his 
verses, " On a Maid seen by a Scholar in Somerset 
House Garden." 

Mr Gammon, in Gissing's Town Traveller, loved to 
ride down the Strand on a bus. " He enjoyed a 
' block,' and was disappointed unless he saw the 
policeman at Wellington Street holding up his hand 
whilst the cross traffic from north and south rolled 
gradually through. It always reminded him of the 
Bible story — Moses parting the waters of the Red 
Sea." One day by chance, Miss Waghorn and her 
young man, Mr. Nibby, climbed on to the same bus 



252 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

and sat behind him ; Miss Waghorn hailed him, and 
introduced the two gentlemen, and, " the bus drawing 
slowly near a popular wine shop," on Mr. Nibby's 
suggestion they all got down and turned into that 
shop, where " the dark narrow space before the 
counter or bar was divided off with wooden partitions 
as at a pawnbroker's ; each compartment had a high 
stool for the luxuriously inclined, and along the wall 
ran a bare wooden bench." From which description 
one easily recognises Short's, which is opposite 
Somerset House. Wellington Street runs south to 
Waterloo Bridge, which was Hood's Bridge of Sighs ; 
and north, past the bow fronted office in which Dickens 
used to edit Household Words (with the Lyceum 
opposite, as he mentions in one of his reprinted 
articles) ; past Maiden Lane, where Turner was born 
over his father's barber shop against Hand Court, 
and where Thackeray's Philip went to a concert at 
the Cyder Cellars, being tired of the opera at Co vent 
Garden ; by Russell Street, where Lamb and his 
sister lived, where still remains something of Will's 
famous coffee-house, to which the wits went to meet 
Dry den, and in which Lytton puts a scene of his Not 
So Bad As We Seem — Russell Street, where Johnson 
first met Boswell at No. 8, and where, long before 
that, the Rose tavern used to stand, to which Shirley 
refers in his play, Hyde Park, when Lord Bonvile 
reassures Julietta that Venture and Bonavent, who 
have gone away from them breathing fire and 
slaughter, will not fight, but that 

A cup of sack, and Anthony at the Rose 

Will reconcile their furies ; 

— and so into Bow Street. 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 253 

Wycherley, who lived on the west side of Bow Street, 
places a scene of his Plain Dealer at The Cock there. 
The police-station fills the site of the house in which, 
first, Waller lived, and afterwards Fielding, whilst 
he was writing Tom Jones. In one of the Sketches 
by Boz the ubiquitous Dickens pictures the prisoners 
being taken away from Bow Street station in the 
prison van ; and at Bow Street, as you may read at 
full in Oliver Twist, the Artful Dodger was brought 
up before -the magistrate on a charge of pocket - 
picking and committed for trial, Noah Claypole, under 
Fagin's directions, being among the audience, disguised 
as a countryman, to witness what happened. Mr. 
Bows, of Pendennis, was " employed as pianoforte 
player, to accompany the eminent lyrical talent which 
nightly delighted the public at the Fielding's Head 
in Covent Garden : and where was held a little club 
called the Back Kitchen. Numbers of Pen's friends 
frequented this very merry meeting. The Fielding's 
Head had been a house of entertainment almost since 
the time when the famous author of Tom Jones pre- 
sided as magistrate in the neighbouring Bow Street." 
When Lord Castlewood and Lord Mohun quarrelled 
in the Greyhound, at Charing Cross, and went away to 
fight that fatal duel in Leicester Fields (which is now 
Leicester Square) it was given out, so as to allay sus- 
picion of their purpose, that " the dispute was over 
now, and the parties were all going away to my Lord 
Mohun's house in Bow Street, to drink a bottle more 
before going to bed." 

Mr. Minns, to whom we have recently referred, 
lived for twenty years in Tavistock Street, Covent 
Garden, continually falling out with his landlord, 



254 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

giving him notice to quit on the first day of every 
quarter and as regularly countermanding it on the 
second. The old man who begins the story of The 
Old Curiosity Shop was fond of roaming through 
Co vent Garden at sunrise, " in the spring or summer, 
when the fragrance of sweet flowers is in the air, 
overpowering even the unwholesome steams of last 
night's debauchery and driving the dusky thrush, 
whose cage has hung outside a garret window all 
night long, half mad with joy." Ruth and Tom 
Pinch, in Martin Chuzzlewit, used to enjoy wandering 
about the great markets, and '■' many and many a 
pleasant stroll they had in Covent Garden, snuffling 
up the perfume of the fruits and flowers, wondering 
at the magnificence of the pine-apples and melons ; 
catching glimpses down side avenues of rows and rows 
of old women seated on inverted baskets shelling 
peas ; " when David Copperfield, working at the 
Blacking Factory in Blackfriars Road, took his half 
hour off for tea and had no money, he strolled 
" as far as Covent Garden Market, and stared at the 
pine-apples ; " and later, after his aunt had made 
him a young man of means and he was lodging with 
Mrs. Crupp, in Buckingham Street, Strand, he came 
and " bought a little dessert in Covent Garden," in 
preparation for that dinner to which Steerforth and 
his friend Grainger were coming. It was shortly 
before that, when he and Steerforth both happened 
to be staying the night at the Golden Cross Hotel, in 
the Strand, that they went together and saw Julius 
Caesar acted at the Covent Garden Theatre. 

" One brilliant September morning, as Huxter," 
of Pendennis, " was regaling himself with a cup of 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 255 

coffee at a stall in Covent Garden, having spent a 
delicious night dancing at Vauxhall," he saw Captain 
Costigan " reeling down Henrietta Street, with a 
crowd of hooting blackguard boys at his heels : he 
" dived down the alleys by Drury Lane Theatre," 
making for Clements Inn where he had his chambers. 
Warrington, of The Virginians, lodged and entertained 
his friends at the Bedford Head, which is in Covent 
Garden, at the corner of Henrietta Street ; there was 
an early morning when Dr. Johnson arrived in Covent 
Garden, " on a frolic," with Beauclerk and other of 
his friends, and joyously insisted on helping the 
porters to unload their carts ; and Wycherley, Far- 
quhar, and other playwrights before and after them 
have laid more scenes in Covent Garden than I can 
remember. 

In Cecil Street, Strand, which made way for part 
of the Hotel Cecil, lived Dickens himself, for a while ; 
and he put Mr. Watkins Tottle, of the Sketches by Boz, 
to lodge in a small parlour in the same street. Just 
up Adam Street, is the Adelphi Hotel, that is associ- 
ated with an important incident in Pickwick. Here 
Emily Wardle and her father stayed, when they came 
to town, and Mr. Snodgrass, calling whilst old Wardle, 
was out, made timorous but successful love to Emily, 
and was departing when he heard Mr. Wardle and a 
party of guests coming up the stairs, ran back in a 
panic, lost his way in the passages, and concealed 
himself in Mr. Wardle's bedroom. The fat boy, sent 
in for something else, discovered him there and inad- 
vertently betrayed him, and after an outburst of 
wrath against his deception, Mr. Wardle not only 
forgave him and consented to his suit, but he was 



256 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

allowed to sit down next to Emily and dine with her 
and her father, Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Tupman, Mr. Perker, 
Arabella and her brother Ben Allen, and so made the 
Adelphi Hotel a more dazzling place than it looks. 

Villiers Street is built over what was part of York 
House, Wolsey's Palace, before the Duke of Bucking- 
ham contrived to deprive him of it, and Shakespeare's 
Henry VIII gives you a scene in its Presence Chamber, 
with the Cardinal seated in state entertaining his 
guests at a banquet, during which the King arrives, 
masqued as a shepherd, and dances with Anne Boleyn. 
Charing Cross railway station has swallowed up 
Hungerford Street, which led down to Hungerford 
Market, and Hungerford Stairs, and the Blacking 
factory where Dickens himself worked as a boy, as 
David Copperfield worked in the factory at 
Blackfriars. At No. 14, Buckingham Street lived, in 
succession, Pepys, Swift's Harley, Earl of Oxford, 
and Etty and Clarkson Stanfield, the painters. Peter 
the Great is said to have occupied the corner house 
immediately opposite this : and we know that it was 
once occupied by the novelist, William Black ; but 
more to our purpose is the fact that, in his happier 
days, David Copperfield had chambers in this same 
corner house. They saw an advertisement that " in 
Buckingham Street, in the Adelphi, there was to be 
let furnished, with a view of the river, a singularly 
desirable and compact set of chambers ; " and he and 
his Aunt, Betsy Trot wood, promptly went to look at 
them : 

" The advertisement directed us to apply to Mrs Crupp on 
the premises, and we rang the area bell, which we supposed 
to communicate with Mrs Crupp. It was not until we had 




' ; •""" • ,,tt '-" Wi 



fredyJcock. 



" // & «w <?/" £&<7.y<? «00&y £&atf «?r /<?£-«/ w^Ar ; and it contains a little Hall with 
a lantern in its ro&f" " Edwin DroodJ" 

Chapter 13 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 257 

rung three or four times that we could prevail on Mrs. Crupp 
to communicate with us, but at last she appeared, being a 
stout lady with a flounce of flannel petticoat below a nankeen 
gown. 

" ' Let us see these chambers of yours, if you please, ma'am,' 
said my aunt. 

" ' For this gentleman ? ' said Mrs. Crupp, feeling in her 
pocket for the keys. 

" ' Yes, for my nephew,' said my aunt. 

" ' And a sweet set they is for sich ! ' said Mrs. Crupp. 

"So we went upstairs. They were on the top of the house 
— a great point with my aunt, being near the fire-escape — 
and consisted of a little half-blind entry where you could see 
hardly anything, a little stone-blind pantry where you could 
see nothing at all, a sitting-room and a bed-room. The 
furniture was rather faded, but quite good enough for me ; 
and, sure enough, the river was outside the windows." 

Thence went David Copperfield every day to walk 
along the Strand to Mr. Spenlow's office in Doctor's 
Commons ; in these rooms he entertained Steerforth, 
and Uriah Heep, whom he led, by his damp, cold 
hand " up the dark stairs, to prevent him knocking 
his head against anything ; " here he gave a notable 
feast to Mr. and Mrs. Micawber and Traddles, and 
when they departed, towards midnight, he held his 
candle " over the banisters to light them down." 
Here he had Mr. Dick to stay with him, and, to wean 
him from his endless task on the Memorial into which 
King Charles's head invariably intruded, Traddles 
found work for him, and Mr. Dick used to sit at " a 
table by the window in Buckingham Street " copying 
legal documents ; here David's aunt came to live with 
him after she had lost her money, and of an evening 
Traddles would read famous political speeches out of 

17 



258 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



Enfield's Speaker whilst David took them down in 
shorthand, bent on learning that art, and his aunt 
and Mr. Dick sat and listened and added to the 
realistic reproduction of a Parliamentary debate by 
throwing in an occasional " Hear ! Hear ! " One 
could go on with similar reminiscences. " There was 
an old Roman Bath in those days at the bottom of 
one of the streets out of the Strand — it may be there 
still — in which I had many a cold plunge," says 
David ; and if you go into the uneven, precipitous 
Strand Lane, a few yards east of Somerset House, you 
will find that Roman Bath there to this hour. Re- 
membering these things, and how whilst he sojourned 
in Buckingham Street David Copperfield was dis- 
tracted with love for Dora Spenlow, agitated over the 
tragedy of Steerforth's treachery, and Little EmTy's 
disappearance, going out to meet Mr. Peggotty, and 
help him in his vain search for her — remembering all 
these things and such other minute details of David's 
everyday life, we are as strongly drawn to this house 
as if it were Dickens who had actually inhabited it 
and not only the people of his imagination. 

Mr. Brownlow, of Oliver Twist, was staying at a 
house in Craven Street, which is the last street but 
one on this side, near the top of the Strand, when 
Oliver found him and was restored to him by Rose 
Mayley ; and the last street of all, Northumberland 
Street, when it was named Hartshorn Lane, contained 
the house in which Ben Jonson passed his boyhood. 

A little way back, over the road, is the Golden Cross 
Hotel, which has been rebuilt. It is nowadays a 
large and stately edifice, but when David Copperfield 
put up there, with Steerforth, it was " a mouldy sort 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 259 

of establishment." Through Steerforth's intervention 
he was transferred from a small bed-chamber which 
had been shut up like a family vault to a comfortable, 
large front room, from the window of which next 
morning he had a view of the statue of King Charles 
on horseback, which still stands at Charing Cross 
looking down Whitehall. Albert Smith's Christopher 
Tadpole put up at that earlier Golden Cross ; and, to 
say nothing of others, thither went Mr. Pickwick in a 
cab, which he chartered from St. Martin's le Grand, and 
when he alighted there the cabman wanted to fight him 
outside on the pavement over the amount of his fare, 
but was prevented by the timely appearance of Mr. 
Jingle, who afterwards went inside with Mr. Pickwick, 
Mr. Snodgrass, Mr. Winkle and Mr. Tupman, who had 
been waiting there for their chief, and being duly 
refreshed they all mounted the coach and set out 
from the Golden Cross on that eventful journey to 
Rochester. 

Suckling begins his Ballad of a Wedding, with a 
reference to the adjacent Haymarket : 

At Charing Cross, hard by the way 
Where we, thou know'st, do sell our hay ; 

Lewis Morris singing of Trafalgar Square, which opens 
from the Strand and Charing Cross, sketches the 
crippled beggar who sat " under the picture gallery 
wall," 

A face as pale as the sheeted dead, 
A frail body propped on a padded crutch, 
And lean long fingers, which flutter the keys 
Of an old accordion ; 



260 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

but Henley gives the finest picture of the place, on a 
golden day of October, when 

Trafalgar Square 

(The fountains volleying golden glaze) 

Shines like an angel-market. High aloft 

Over his couchant Lions in a haze 

Shimmering and bland and soft, 

A dust of chrysoprase, 

Our Sailor takes the golden gaze 

Of the saluting sun, and flames superb 

As once he flamed it on his ocean round. 

The dingy dreariness of the picture-place, 

Turned very nearly bright, 

Takes on a luminous transiency of grace, 

And shows no more a scandal to the ground. 

The very blind man pottering on the kerb, 

Among the posies and the ostrich feathers 

And the rude voices touched with all the weathers 

Of the long, varying year, 

Shares in the universal alms of light. 

Up beside the picture-place, which is the National 
Gallery, runs St. Martin's Lane, and down St. Martin's 
Lane, one snowy, wintry evening, came David Copper- 
field, on his way home from Highgate to Buckingham 
Street. 

" Now, the church which gives its name to the Lane, stood 
in a less free situation at that time ; there being no open 
space before it, and the lane winding down to the Strand. As 
I passed the steps of the portico, I encountered at the corner 
a woman's face. It looked in mine, passed across the narrow 
lane, and disappeared. I knew it. I had seen it somewhere. 
But I could not remember where. ... On the steps of the 
church, there was the stooping figure of a man who had put 
down some burden on the smooth snow to adjust it ; my 
seeing the face, and my seeing him were simultaneous. . . . 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 261 

As I went on, he rose, turned and came down towards me. 
I stood face to face with Mr Peggotty ! Then I remembered 
the woman. It was Martha, to whom Emily had given the 
money that night in the kitchen. Martha Endell — side by 
side with whom he would not have seen his dear niece, Ham 
told me, for all the treasures wrecked in the sea. We shook 
hands heartily. At first, neither of us could speak a word. 

" ' Mas'r Davy ! ' he said, gripping me tight, ' it do my art 
good to see you, sir. Well met, well met ! " 

They went for shelter, by a back way, into the 
Golden Cross, where Mr. Peggotty recounted his 
wanderings about the world, trying to get on the 
track of Steerforth and the girl he had taken away 
with him. 

Young Ferdinand, in Disraeli's Henrietta Temple, 
came to London with Mr. Glastonbury, and a hackney 
coach carried them from Bishopsgate to Charing Cross 
and deposited them at Morley's Hotel, which Disraeli 
speaks of as in Cockspur Street, but it is now in 
Trafalgar Square ; and next morning the two came 
out together to see the town, Ferdinand talking all 
the way, wild with excitement : 

" Is this Charing Cross, sir ? — I wonder if we shall ever be 
able to get over. — Is this the fullest part of the town, sir ? — 
What a fine day, sir ! — How lucky we are in the weather ! — 
. . . Who is that ?— What is this ?— The Admiralty ? Oh, 
let me see the Admiralty ! — The Horse Guards ! — Oh, where, 
where ? — Let us set our watches by the Horse Guards. — Mr. 
Glastonbury, which is the best clock, the Horse Guards' or 
St Paul's ? — Is that the Treasury ? — Can we go in ? — That 
is Downing Street, is it ? — Is this Charing Cross still, or is it 
Parliament Street ? — Where does Charing Cross end, and 
where does Parliament Street begin ? — By Jove, I see West- 
minster Abbey ! " 



262 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Downing Street, the Government offices, and Carlton 
Terrace on the other side of the way, have associations 
with Trollope's great novel, The Prime Minister, but 
since we have come as far as the Abbey we will not go 
back for them, nor for one or two reminiscences of 
Spring Gardens and Cannon Row, nor for many of 
Whitehall, that looms so large in a hundred and one 
Carolian and Cromwellian plays and romances. Even 
more and older memories are gathered about this 
Westminster area, that is covered by Westminster 
Hall, the Houses of Parliament, and the Abbey ; 
which have all, except the Abbey, been rebuilt within 
the last hundred years. These are not the Parliament- 
ary buildings that Hugh and Dennis, the hangman, 
came lurking round, in Barnaby Rudge, when Dennis 
pointed out " how easy it was to get into the lobby 
and so to the very door of the House of Commons." 
This is not the Westminster Hall that Shakespeare 
knew ; nor the one in which Wycherley has a scene 
of his Plain Dealer ; nor the one to which Mr. Haredale 
came (again in Barnaby Rudge) and met Sir John 
Chester and Mr. Gashford among the miscellaneous 
throng that flowed in and out through its lofty door- 
way ; but it is the Hall in which Alaric Tudor and 
Undy Scott, of Trollope's Three Clerks, talked of the 
ruin the unscrupulous Undy had brought upon his 
friend, till Alaric came near to losing his self-control 
and resorting to violence. They walked " up and 
down the immense space of Westminster Hall," Undy 
explaining what had been passing within on the 
Parliamentary Committee of which he was a member, 
and at the crisis of the interview, when Alaric took 
hold of him by the collar of his coat, were " standing 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 263 

at the upper end of the Hall — close under the steps 
which lead to the House of Parliament.' ' 

If you go round the side of the Abbey, by Great 
Smith Street, you may find your way easily into Smith 
Square ; and in " Church Street, Smith Square, Mill 
Bank," Lizzie Hexam, of Our Mutual Friend, lived, 
with Jenny Wren, the crippled little doll's dressmaker. 
Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam called there 
to see her, crossing the Westminster Bridge and 
making along the Middlesex shore towards Millbank : 

" In this region are a certain little street, called Church 
Street, and a certain little blind square, called Smith Square, 
in the centre of which last retreat is a very hideous church 
with four towers at the four corners, generally resembling 
some petrified monster, frightful and gigantic, on its back 
with its legs in the air. They found a tree near by in a corner, 
and a blacksmith's forge, and a timber yard, and a dealer's 
in old iron. What a rusty portion of a boiler and a great iron 
wheel or so meant by lying half-buried in the dealer's forecourt, 
nobody seemed to know or want to know. . . . After making 
the round of this place, and noting that there was a deadly 
kind of repose on it, more as though it had taken laudanum 
than fallen into a natural rest, they stopped at the point where 
the street and the square joined, and where there were some 
little quiet houses in a row. To these Charley Hexam finally 
led the way, and at one of these he stopped. ' This must be 
where my sister lives, sir. This is where she came for a 
temporary lodging soon after father's death.' " 

He knocked ; the door promptly opened with a 
spring, and the parlour door within, standing open, 
revealed Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker, to them 
— " a child — a dwarf — a girl — a something sitting in a 
little low old-fashioned arm-chair, which had a kind 
of little working bench before it." The house and all 



264 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



Church Street were there until a few months ago ; 
now they have been knocked down and carted away, 
but Smith Square, with the hideous church that is 
too large for it, the wood yard, and general litter, and 
the somnolent air that hangs over everything, are all 
as exactly the same as if Dickens had only written of 
them yesterday. 

You make acquaintance with Smith Square again 
in Besant's Beyond the Dreams of Avarice ; when Ella 
Burley came over from America with her Aunt Lucinda 
to establish their identities and prove their relation- 
ship to the multi-millionaire, James Calvert Burley, 
who had practised as a solicitor in England until his 
death in 1875. They took a lodging " in Westminster, 
so as to be on the spot, close to Great College Street ; 
in fact, it was in Smith Square, where stands the huge 
mass of stone called the Church of St. John the 
Evangelist." The family of Burley had belonged to 
the Church of St. John " since the creation of the 
parish in the year 1716/ ' and Besant compiles a 
pedigree of them, drawn from St. John's parish 
register. Ella and her Aunt were regular attend- 
ants at the church services, and you can easily 
identify all their walks about the locality — this, for 
example : 



" They walked nearly round the Square, their thoughts far 
away. Then Ella turned into a street, for no reason, her aunt 
following her ; and in two or three minutes they found them- 
selves in an unexpected place — a Continental place — which 
brought their thoughts back to Westminster. . . . Ella looked 
round her, awakened by the unexpected. For she stood 
suddenly in the most quiet and peaceful spot of all London. 
Houses of the early eighteenth century, with porches, and 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 265 

pillars, and flat facades, stand round this place, houses built 
for the comfort that our grandfathers placed so far above 
artistic show and aesthetic display." 

This secluded street brings them into Great College 
Street, and in Great College Street is the house 
formerly occupied by the deceased millionaire, and 
now tenanted by the newly married Dr. Lucien 
Calvert and his wife, who are among the numerous 
claimants to the dead man's millions. Before Lucien 
and his wife, Margaret, took it he brought her to see 
the place, and — 

" It was, she found, a lovely old house. Steps, side steps, 
with a good old iron railing, led to the stoop and to the front 
door. There were three stories, each with three windows ; 
there was a steep red-tiled roof with dormer windows. Over 
the whole front hung a thick green curtain of Virginia creeper. 
... On the other side of the street was the old grey wall of 
the Cathedral precincts— did Edward the Confessor build that 
wall, or was it an earlier work still ?— the work of Dunstan, 
what time His Majesty King Edgar endowed the Abbey ? " 

Here is another description of it, given by Lucy 
to her father Sir John Burley, another claimant to 
the estate : 

" It is close to the Houses of Parliament. . . . The houses 
are only on one side : on the other is a grey stone wall — the 
garden wall of the Abbey. . . . The front of the house is 
covered all over with a magnificent creeper, the leaves crimson 
and purple and golden— it is like a glorified house. There is 
a red tiled roof, there is a raised door and steps and old-fashioned 
iron railings. . . . The street is called Great College Street." 

And the beautiful old house is there exactly as all 
those people of Beyond the Dreams of Avarice saw it, 
and looking as if it might yet prove more lasting than 



266 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



Besant's story about it. Whilst Dr. Calvert was 
absent every day about his duties at the Children's 
Hospital in Buckingham Palace Road, Margaret 
would go out for quiet walks " in the Park, or about 
the quiet courts of the Abbey ; " and after she had 
become friendly with Ella, they would sometimes go 
together, and their favourite stroll took them through 
the obscure doorway near the end of Great College 
Street " into the large quiet Square called Dean's 
Yard ; " but Margaret knew of a quieter place even 
than this : 

" Under an archway, across an open court, through a broad 
arched corridor she led the girl into a little square court, sur- 
rounded by a stone cloister ; in the midst was a square of grass, 
with a fountain that ought to have been playing but was not : 
tablets on the walls commemorated dead men's names and 
lives. . . . There were ancient doors and ancient windows 
of crumbling, worn stone, and above the corridor were houses 
which looked as if they were built what time great Oliver ruled 
the realm. ' This is the Infirmary Cloister,' said Margaret. 
1 It is the quietest place in the world. You hear nothing in 
these cloisters of the outside world — nothing but the striking 
of the great clock : you see nothing but the Victoria Tower. . . . 
I come here often when I am troubled. . . . Only to linger 
among these grey old stones soothes and comforts one.' " 

Tarrant, of Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee, took 
lodgings in Great College Street, when he was working 
as a journalist, and anxious to regain the love of his 
deserted wife (the one-time Nancy Lord) who was 
living in the neighbourhood ; and his walks and 
sometimes hers, were in the shadow of the Houses of 
Parliament, in Dean's Yard, and thereabouts. Gilbert 
Grail, in Thyrza, would spend " an hour of his Satur- 
day afternoon in Westminster Abbey ; " and into the 



THE STRAND AND WESTMINSTER 267 

Abbey went Walter Egremont, and sat in a shadowed 
place alone, distracted with his secret love for Thyrza 
— there in the same place where his poorer, unsuccess- 
ful rival, the working man, Gilbert Grail, " often 
walked and sought solace from the bitterness of his 
accursed lot." Margaret Calvert used to walk in the 
Abbey, as well as in its mouldering cloisters ; and she 
and her husband would attend afternoon service there 
on Sundays. The Abbey holds memories of greater 
and more splendid scenes, but they are only half 
imaginary. A gentleman in Shakespeare's Henry 
VIII. describes Anne Boleyn's coronation in it ; the 
opening scene of his Henry VI. is placed in it, during 
the funeral ceremonies of Henry V. ; and a memorable 
scene of Henry IV. is enacted in its ancient Jerusalem 
Chamber. 

One does not read the names of so many Kings and 
Queens and great men on its ageing monuments and 
quit what Young calls, 

That solemn mansion of the royal dead 

Where passing slaves o'er sleeping monarchs tread, 

without recalling Beaumont's lines " On the Tombs 
in Westminster Abbey " : 

Mortality, behold and fear, 

What a change of flesh is here ! 

Think how many royal bones 

Sleep within this heap of stones ; 

Here they lie, had realms and lands, 

Who now want strength to stir their hands ; 

Where from their pulpits sealed in dust, 

They preach, ' In greatness is no trust ! ' 

Here's an acre sown indeed 

With the richest, royal'st seed. . . . 



268 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Here the bones of birth have cried, 

' Though gods they were, as men they died ; ' . 

Here's a world of pomp and state 

Buried in dust . . . 

As Beaumont, who was himself afterwards brought 
here to be buried, walked through the Abbey musing 
of these things, so you may take it his contemporary 
Dr. Donne was no stranger to the place, before he 
wrote in one of his Satires : 

'Tis sweet to talk of Kings. At Westminster, 
Said I, the man that keeps the Abbey tombs 
And for his price doth, with who ever comes, 
Of all our Harrys and our Edwards talk, 
From King to King, and all their kin, can walk • 
Your ears shall hear nought but Kings ; your eyes meet 
Kings only. The way to it is King's Street. 
And King Street is one of the ways to it still Just 
outside the Abbey waited Falstaff and his Page, with 
Bardolph, Pistol, and Justice Shallow, whilst Henry V. 
was crowned within ; and here, when the reformed 
Henry with his train came forth, he had the heart to 
snub his old boon companion and leave the prating 
Chief Justice to have Sir John and all his company 
arrested and carried off to the Fleet Prison. 

By the Abbey is St. Margaret's church, dear to all 
book-lovers as the burial place of Caxton ; and if you 
are there at the right hour, you may come away 
hearing, as Henley heard, 
St Margaret's bells, 

Quiring their innocent, old-world canticles, 
Sing in the storied air 
All rosy-and-golden, as with memories 
Of woods at evensong, and sands and seas 
Disconsolate for that the night is nigh. 



I 



CHAPTER XII 

PICCADILLY AND THE PARKS 

F life were longer and books need have no limit, 
_we would go farther up the river in the footprints 
of the imaginary people who haunt those parts : to 
Chelsea, where some of Henry Kingsley's and some of 
Gissing's characters lived ; to Chiswick, where on the 
Mall, by the Thames, stands Walpole House, which 
is Miss Pinkerton's Academy, in Vanity Fair, with 
Amelia Sedley and Becky Sharp among its inmates ; 
to Richmond, where, to say nothing of many another, 
Jeanie Deans was taken to see the Queen in old 
Richmond Palace. But life and books being what 
they are, we go back instead and get on to the route 
that Charley Tudor, of The Three Clerks, took when, 
coming from his office in Somerset House, " he went 
along the Strand, over the crossing under the statue 
of Charles on horseback, and up Pall Mall East till he 
came to the opening into the Park, under the Duke of 
York's column." He noticed the colonnade that 
stretched up Pall Mall from the corner of the Hay- 
market, but this is gone now, or I would have quoted 
the vivid scene in The Unclassed, where Waymark 
leans smoking against one of its pillars and first makes 
acquaintance with Ida Starr there. 

Or, instead of going up Pall Mall to enter it by the 
Duke of York's column, you can go into St. James's 



270 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Park by the Mall, out of Charing Cross, and, if the 
living crowd in it does not sufficiently interest you, 
can refill it with the real people and the dream people 
it has known : Nigel, who walked there and met 
Prince Charles with his courtiers, and presently dis- 
graced himself by breaking into that furious affray 
with Lord Dalgarno in the precincts of St. James's 
Palace ; Pepys, who loved the place, and to encounter 
Charles II. or his Queen, or some of the Court 
favourites in its pleasant grounds ; those men and 
women of Wycherley's, who came out of his Love in a 
Wood : or St. James's Park ; of Congreve's, out of 
his Way of the World ; of Vanbrugh's and Farquhar's, 
out of various plays of theirs, for the Park was never 
a more fashionable or more popular place than it was 
in the brilliant, joyous, wicked days of the Restora- 
tion. In the Park, here, Captain Booth, the husband 
of Fielding's Amelia, would take his walks abroad, 
and was here on the day he met Colonel Bath with 
some other officers, and being insulted by the Colonel 
said, " If we were not in the Park I would thank you 
very properly for that compliment." Saying they 
could soon be in a convenient place, 

" The Colonel bid him come along, and strutted forward 
directly up Constitution Hill, to Hyde Park, Booth following 
him at first, and afterwards walking before him, till they came 
to that place which may be properly called the field of blood, 
being that part a little to the left of the ring, which heroes have 
chosen for their exit out of this world." 

The Colonel took off his wig and coat and laid them 
on the grass ; they both drew, and after a few furious 
passes, Booth ran him through the body, and as he 
lay on the ground, a few words of explanation made 



PICCADILLY AND THE PARKS 271 

it clear that he had insulted Booth under a misappre- 
hension ; they shook hands warmly, and were recon- 
ciled. The Colonel's injury was slight, but Booth 
insisted on running to Grosvenor Gate to fetch a chair 
and have him carried home. Ralph Nickleby, crossing 
St. James's Park from Pimlico, on his road home, was 
caught in a storm and took shelter under one of the 
trees, and was accosted there by Mr. Brooker, the 
broken wretch whom he had wronged. 

Quite late one evening, after dining, young Everett 
Wharton and Ferdinand Lopez in Trollope's Prime 
Minister, "strolled out into St. James's Park;" 
Everett was in no pleasant humour, and as they got 
round in front of Buckingham Palace, they came to 
words, and along Birdcage Walk, near Storey's Gate, 
Lopez said an abrupt good-night and went off alone. 
It was by now dark, and having a suspicion that 
Everett was slightly the worse for drink, Lopez 
hesitated, feeling that he ought to look after him. 
Hearing a curious rush and scuffle in the dark behind 
him, he ran back to find Everett on the ground, a 
man kneeling on him and two women rifling his 
pockets. He rushed to the rescue, there was a hot, 
brief giving and taking of blows, and the women and 
the man had fled, and Everett had risen and was 
leaning against the railings. He was wounded and 
bleeding; his watch and his money were stolen. 
" They walked very slowly away towards the steps of 
the Duke of York's column. ... At the foot of the 
steps they met a policeman, to whom they told their 
story, and who, as a matter of course, was filled with 
an immediate desire to arrest them both. ... But 
after ten minutes' parley, during which Wharton sat 



272 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

on the bottom step and Lopez explained all the 
circumstances, he consented to get them a cab ; " 
and the reputation for this rescue afterwards stood 
the cunning Lopez in good stead with Everett's father, 
and particularly with his sister. 

In St. James's Park, in St. James's Palace, and in 
St. James's Square, which lies outside, off Pall Mall, 
Ainsworth has scenes of his novel, St. James's, Tom 
Taylor of his dramas, Lady Clancarty, and 'Twixt Axe 
an£ Crown, and Thackeray of Esmond. Pendennis 
walked with the Major " through the Green Park " 
(which separates St. James's from Hyde Park) " where 
many poor children were disporting happily, and 
errand boys were playing at toss halfpenny, and black 
sheep were grazing in the sunshine, and an actor was 
learning his part on a bench, and nursery maids and 
their charges sauntered here and there ; " and from 
the Green Park "made their way into Grosvenor 
Place, and to the door of the mansion occupied there 
by Sir Francis and Lady Clavering." 

You cannot cross from the Green Park to Hyde 
Park Corner without noticing Apsley House, where 
the great Duke of Wellington lived; Thackeray's 
Philip comes in from Hyde Park, and tells his friends 
in Beaunash Street, " As I passed by Apsley House, I 
saw the Duke come out, with his old blue frock and 
white trousers and clear face ; " and you see the Duke 
somewhere else in Thackeray— I forget for the moment 
where— riding from Apsley House down Piccadilly. 
I don't think nightingales are to be heard in any of 
the Parks now, but in Shirley's comedy, Hyde Park, 
you have Mistress Carol, catching at the old super- 
stition that it is lucky to hear the nightingale, 




53 JJjTTO/i QARDaH 
Fred y4d cock. • 



At S3 Hatton Garden was the old police-court presided over by a Mr. Laing, an unjust 
and intolerant magistrate who was the original of Mr. Fang in ' Oliver Twist.' " 

Chapter /j 



PICCADILLY AND THE PARKS 273 

crying out to Fairfield, as they walk in the Park 
together : 

Hark, sir, the nightingale : there is better luck 
Coming towards us. 

You have Lacy, in the same play, urging his friends : 
" Prythee stay : we'll to Hyde Park together ; " and 
Bonavent adding, " There you may meet with morris- 
dancers " — and that too has become a thing of the 
past, but " Hyde Park has still something about it 
of Arcadia," as Disraeli says in Tancred, and apart 
from the extravagance of its flattery there is nothing 
so out of date in Lord Bonvile's Hyde Park greeting 
of Julietta : 

Lady, you are welcome to the spring ; the Park 
Looks fresher to salute you : how the birds 
On every tree sing with more cheerfulness 
At your access. 

For how many centuries it has been the mode for 
society to take the air in Rotten Row I do not know ; 
but Ben Jonson's Fitzdotterel, in The Devil is an Ass, 
proposes to buy a gilt coach that his wife and her 
lover may ride together in it into Hyde Park ; and 
Randolph writes of Madame Lesbia who lavished 
money on a favourite young actor, so that he 

May scatter angels, rub out silks, and shine 
In cloths of gold ; cry loud, ' The world is mine : ' 
Keep his race-nags, and in Hyde Park be seen 
Brisk as the best. 

Mr. Foker, of Pendennis, brooding over his vain love 
for Blanche Amory, " cantered away down Rotten 
Row, his mind agitated with various emotions, 
18 



274 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

ambitions, mortifications," and nearly ran into the 
roomy carriage of his Aunt Lady Rosherville, and 
in it with his aunt was the Lady Ann, to whom he 
was betrothed. George Warrington, in The Virginians, 
displeased his family by his marriage, and " walking 
shortly afterwards in Hyde Park with my dearest 
companion," he says, " I met my little cousin exer- 
cising on horseback with a groom behind him ; " and 
in defiance of orders, the little Miles Warrington pulled 
up to speak with his cousin and to admire the pretti- 
ness of his cousin's wife. To be seen riding or driving 
in Rotten Row has been the hall-mark of social 
superiority since long before you and I were born ; 
and when Mr. Gudge and his wife, in Christopher 
Tadpole, had risen in the world and went driving in 
Hyde Park, they were only doing what is commonly 
done by those who rise : 

" There were all sorts of vehicles that afternoon in the Park. 
Heavy old family coaches, with coachmen and horses to match, 
and the most wonderful old ladies inside that ever were seen — 
equipages that crept out year after year with their panels 
revarnished and their brass-work relacquered . . . new 
barouches, blazing with escutcheons like theatrical banners, 
and liveries almost like the harlequins', just started by parvenus 
living on the borders of the exclusive world and constantly 
fighting to pass its frontier ; mail-phaetons driven by men 
about town, who had gone round and round the Park for thirty 
years and still clung to the peculiar hats, cravats and general 
demeanour that distinguished them when they commenced 
their career. . . . There were broughdams too, with blinds 
half down and small dogs looking out of the window ; within 
which might be seen faces once fair and still with sufficient 
beauty to attract attention." 

The style of carriage has altered ; there are motor- 



PICCADILLY AND THE PARKS 275 

cars among them ; and those who ride in them or on 
horseback have changed the fashion of their garments ; 
otherwise, the same stream flows by in the road, with 
the same types of young bloods and old dandies 
walking on the footpath, or lolling on the railings, 
day after day through the season, and there is always 
some social climber flowing in the stream who gazes 
on the gorgeous pageant from inside something finer 
than the hired carriage that satisfied Albert Smith's Mr. 
Gudge and says in his heart, as Mr. Gudge said aloud to 
his wife, " Well, there's a comfort in mixing with the 
nobs, anyhow, though you ain't one of 'em by birth." 
Pendennis, in The Newcomes, came upon Fred 
Bayham in Hyde Park, " toying affably with a nursery 
maid who stood with some of her little charges 
watching the yachts upon the Serpentine," which 
parts Hyde Park from Kensington Gardens ; but no 
writer has used the Serpentine more effectively than 
it is used by Besant, in The Seamy Side. Anthony 
Hamblin, harrassed by financial difficulties and 
threatened with a certain exposure and disgrace, goes 
one evening to skate on the Serpentine. He gives his 
overcoat into the care of one of the Royal Humane 
Society's officers, and is standing at the edge of the 
ice, brooding heavily and about to fasten on his 
skates, when a sudden noise startles him. He glances 
up, and " where the people had been crowded, skating 
and running, Anthony gazed upon a great open space, 
in which a hundred and fifty people were struggling 
in the water among the broken blocks of ice for very 
life, amid the shrieks and cries of spectators helpless 
to do anything." In a flash, he sees a way out of 
his troubles. Unnoted in the general hubbub and 



276 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

excitement, he slips quietly away and disappears ; 
his coat remains unclaimed, and that night his name 
appears in the newspaper lists of those who had 
perished in the ice-accident. 

With no more than a glance at Kensington Gardens, 
that is haunted by Leigh Hunt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
Thackeray, and his characters, and by Matthew 
Arnold, who mused and wrote one of his poems in 
them ; we shall take a turn up Piccadilly, before we 
negotiate Park Lane on our road back to the City 
and the end of our tour. Piccadilly always reminds 
me at once of Laurence Oliphant's clever satirical 
novel that was named after it ; there is a subtle sug- 
gestion of the world, the flesh and the devil, and all 
the good things of life that are so bad for us, in its 
very name. It is a street of riches and beauty and 
pleasure ; it knows nothing of the sordid miseries 
that are vulgarly obtruded upon us in poorer, com- 
moner thoroughfares ; or if it does it is well-bred 
enough to conceal the fact. The Green Park makes 
a pleasaunce along one side of it, half the length of 
its way ; all behind the other side of it lies Mayfair, 
inhabited, not only in Thackeray's and Disraeli's 
novels, but in reality, by those happy ones who toil 
not neither do they spin ; in its byways, or just 
beyond it in Pall Mall, are all the most expen- 
sive and exclusive Clubs in London, and some 
of the most magnificent hotels. Once you grow 
sensitive to London's varying atmospheres and 
moods and can readily subserviate your own to 
them in your walks abroad, you will sympathise 
with Locker-Lampson's gay eulogy of this happiest 
of streets : 



PICCADILLY AND THE PARKS 277 

Piccadilly ! — shops, palaces, bustle and breeze, 
The whirling of wheels, and the murmur of trees, 
By night, or by day, whether noisy or stilly, 
Whatever my mood is — I love Piccadilly ! 

Clarges Street, in which Warrington's stately aunt 
Lambert had her address, conducts you to Curzon 
Street, which still retains intact the Curzon Street 
Chapel that appears in The Newcomes as " that 
elegant and commodious chapel, known as Lady 
Whittlesea's." The Rev. Charles Honeyman " ven- 
tured his little all " on securing a lease of it. Rank 
and fashion flocked to it then, as they flock to it now, 
and Thackeray lets you overhear Lord Dozeley and 
his wife, coming away one Sunday evening among the 
crowd who have been to the service, discuss Mr. 
Honeyman and his prospects. Says my Lord, "He 
can't make less than a thousand a year out of his 
chapel. ... A thousand a year, besides the rent, of 
the wine-vaults below the chapel." " Don't, CJiarles," 
says his wife, with a solemn look. " Don't ridicule 
things in that way." " Confound it ! there are wine- 
vaults under the chapel," answers downright Charles. 
" It's better to sit over vaults with wine in them than 
coffins." When Honeyman fell into debt, Mr Sherrick, 
who was his landlord and ran the wine-vaults, had 
him arrested and confined in Mr. Moss's spunging- 
house in Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane, from which 
he emerged triumphantly to resume his ministrations 
at the Chapel with more eclat than ever. 

When Rawdon Crawley married Becky Sharp, in 
Vanity Fair, they set up their establishment in Curzon 
Street, in a furnished house of which Mr. Ruggles, the 
ex-butler, was landlord. Here Sir Pitt Crawley 



278 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

stayed with them, whilst his own dismal house in 
Great Gaunt Street (otherwise Berkeley Street) was 
being renovated, and on an important occasion, he 
descended the steps, "in a glittering uniform, his 
sword between his legs," and with Rawdon and Becky 
was driven away to join " the line of equipages which 
was making its way down Piccadilly and St. James's 
Street towards the old brick Palace," where Becky 
was to be presented by him at Court. It was the 
splendid parties Becky gave here that helped to 
plunge Rawdon into debt, but the house is chiefly 
memorable as the scene of one of the greatest incidents 
in all Thackeray's books. We have seen Rawdon 
arrested in the street and borne off to the Cursitor 
Street spunging-house ; when by the efforts of some 
of his friends, he was set at liberty, he came back to 
Curzon Street that night to see his drawing-room 
windows blazing with light. Letting himself in, he 
heard laughter in the upper rooms ; Becky was singing, 
and it was Lord Steyne's voice that rose in applause. 

" Rawdon opened the door and went in. A little table with 
a dinner was laid out — and wine and plate. Steyne was hang- 
ing over the sofa on which Becky sate. ... He had her hand 
in his, and was bowing over it to kiss it, when Becky started 
up with a faint scream as she caught sight of Rawdon's white 
face. At the next instant she tried to smile, a horrid smile, 
as if to welcome her husband ; and Steyne rose up, grinding 
his teeth, pale, and with fury in his looks. He, too, attempted 
a laugh — and came forward holding out his hand. ' What, 
come back ! How d'ye do, Crawley ? ' he said, the nerves of 
his mouth twitching as he tried to grin at the intruder. 

" There was that in Rawdon's face which caused Becky to 
fling herself before him. ' I am innocent, Rawdon,' she said, 
' before God, I am innocent.' She clung hold of his coat, of 



PICCADILLY AND THE PARKS 279 

his hands ; her own were all covered with serpents, and rings 
and baubles. ' I am innocent. — Say I am innocent/ she said 
to Lord Steyne. 

" He thought a trap had been laid for him, and was as furious 
with the wife as with the husband. ' You innocent ! Damn 
you/ he screamed out. ' You innocent ! Why every trinket 
you have on your body is paid for by me. I have given you 
thousands of pounds which this fellow has spent, and for which 
he has sold you. Innocent, by — ! . . . Don't think to 
frighten me as you have done others. Make way, sir, and let 
me pass ; ' and Lord Steyne seized up his hat and, with flame 
in his eyes and looking his enemy fiercely in the face, marched 
upon him, never for a moment doubting that the other would 
give way. But Rawdon Crawley springing out, seized him 
by the neckcloth, until Steyne, almost strangled, writhed and 
bent under his arm. ' You lie, you dog ! ' said Rawdon. 
' You lie, you coward and villain ! ' And he struck the Peer 
twice over the face with his open hand, and flung him bleeding 
to the ground. It was all done before Becky could interpose. 
She stood there trembling before him. She admired her 
husband, strong, brave, and victorious. 

" ' Come here/ he said. — She came up at once. ' Take off 
those things.' — She began, trembling, pulling the jewels from 
her arms, and the rings from her shaking fingers, and held 
them all in a heap, quivering and looking up at him. ' Throw 
them down,' he said, and she dropped them. He tore the 
diamond ornament out of her breast, and flung it at Lord 
Steyne. It cut him on his bald forehead. Steyne wore the 
scar to his dying day. 

" ' Come upstairs/ Rawdon said to his wife. ' Don't kill 
me, Rawdon/ she said. He laughed savagely. ' I want to 
see if that man lies about the money as he has about me.' " 

While he searched her desk and boxes upstairs, 
Steyne went home, and Rawdon sent him next morning 
all the bank notes he could find, and left Becky for 
good, hurt past forgiveness that with this money in 



280 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

her possession she could have allowed him to remain 
in prison for debt. 

Lord Steyne's town house stood in Gaunt Square, 
and occupied nearly the whole of one side of it. : ' ( The 
remaining three sides are composed of mansions that 
have passed away into dowagerism — tall, dark houses, 
with window-frames of stone, or picked out of a 
lighter red." Gaunt House is described as having a 
vast wall in front, and rustic columns at the great 
gate. It has been identified by Mr. Lewis Melville 
with a house answering to Thackeray's description 
that takes up nearly all one side of Berkeley Square ; 
the " Buckley Square " associated with the immortal 
Jeames Yellowplush ; but Mrs. E. T. Cook is con- 
vinced that the original of Gaunt House is to be found 
in Manchester Square : it now houses the Wallace 
collection and formerly belonged to the Hertford 
family, and the Lord Hertford of his time was 
admittedly the model from which Lord Steyne was 
drawn. 

Mr. Wharton, of Trollope's Prime Minister, lived in 
Manchester Square ; Gage, of Harrison Ainsworth's 
Spendthrift, in Dover Street ; Major Pendennis was 
continually to and fro between his rooms in Bury 
Street and his Club in St. James's Street. Harry 
Esmond, in The Virginians walked up St. James's 
Street to White's Club on the day the King gave him 
a cold reception at St. James's Palace. St. James's 
Church, in Piccadilly, numbered Major Pendennis 
among its habitual worshippers ; strolling along 
Piccadilly, Harry Esmond and Dick Steele came across 
Addison poring over a folio volume at the bookshop 
which was near St. James's Church ; and in the same 



PICCADILLY AND THE PARKS 281 

Church Alfred Lammle, of Our Mutual Friend, who 
lived in Sackville Street, Piccadilly, was married to 
the unhappy Sophronia. Round the corner, in the 
same novel, that timorous, quaint little gentleman, 
Twemlow, lived in Duke Street, St. James's, over a 
livery stable, which livery stable you may find 
without difficulty up Mason's Yard ; Warrington had 
chambers in Bond Street, where Sterne died ; 
Fascination Fledgby, of Our Mutual Friend, had 
chambers in the Albany, off Bond Street, where 
Byron, Lytton, Macaulay, and other of the immortals 
had chambers before him — but we will not continue 
the list, for there is scarcely a street out of or near 
Piccadilly that has not had its famous residents, real 
or imaginary, and we are not compiling a directory. 






CHAPTER XIII 

OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN AND CLERKENWELL 

I WANT to return along Piccadilly and go by Park 
Lane to Oxford Street, not because Barnes New- 
come lived in Park Lane and Give and the old Major 
were so often knocking at his door ; nor because Miss 
Crawley, in Vanity Fair, had " an exceedingly snug 
and well-appointed house in Park Lane," where 
Becky Sharp stayed with her ; but because when 
you come out by Marble Arch, at the Oxford Street 
end of that Lane, if you look across to the corner 
where Edgware Road joins Bayswater Road you are 
looking at the site of the gallows that stood at Tyburn, 
from the twelfth until near the end of the eighteenth 
century. A hundred and fifty years ago it was still 
a common enough thing to see that grisly procession 
coming up Holborn and Oxford Street to the corner 
yonder : the condemned wretch in the cart, with the 
hangman, his coffin and the chaplain, and a noisy, 
holiday mob preceding and following to swell the 
crowd already awaiting them at Tyburn. Jack 
Sheppard came that shameful pilgrim way to death, 
and Dick Turpin, Sixteen-String Jack, and many 
another soiled knight of the road, as you will know if 
you have read Ainsworth's and other romances of 
them ; and the pages of London's history are dark 
with similar records of poor, less glamorous wretches, 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 283 

and of simple or gallant gentlemen who were more 
unlucky than criminal. 

Oxford Street is part of the great road that the 
Romans built from Watling Street in the city, out 
along Edgware Road and away into the North ; but 
its chief human interest for us is that its stony pave- 
ments were trodden night after night by De Quincey 
in those hungry weeks when he was homeless in 
London and saved from death by the charity of a 
poor street-walker. In Welbeck Street, which turns 
out of Oxford Street on our left, is the house of Lord 
George Gordon, of Barnaby Rudge ; and round Regent 
Street, also to the left, is the Langham Hotel, where 
the millionaire of Besant and Rice's Golden Butterfly, 
gave his famous sensational banquet. A little past 
Regent Street on the right was the Pantheon, to which 
Fanny Burney's Evelina went with Captain, Mrs. and 
Miss Mirvan, and had a momentous meeting with 
Lord Orville. There is a Pantheon now on the same 
spot, built somewhat on the lines of the old one ; it 
is no longer, however, a dancing and pleasure place 
to which the rank and fashion of the town resort, but 
is concerned with the bottled-beer industry. 

All on our right, between this and Charing Cross 
Road, are streets that run into the storied region of 
Soho. Argyll Street will take you through Carnaby 
Street to Golden Square where Ralph Nickleby lived 
with Newman Noggs for his clerk, and in Golden 
Square, too, lived the Kenwigs' family, with whom 
Newman lodged. Young Moss, in The Newcomes, had 
a father " who does bills and keeps a bric-a-brac 
shop in Wardour Street ; " the shade of Thackeray is 
all about the district : "I like to walk among the 



284 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Hebrews of Wardour Street," he says in Philip, " and 
fancy the place, as it once was, crowded with chairs 
and gilt chariots, and torches flashing in the hands of 
running footmen. I have a grim pleasure in thinking 
that Golden Square was once the resort of the aris- 
tocracy, and Monmouth Street the delight of the genteel 
world. ... As the late Mr. Gibbon meditated his 
history leaning against a column in the Capitol, why 
should I not muse over mine, reclining under an arcade 
of the Pantheon ? Not the Pantheon at Rome, in 
the Cabbage Market by the Piazza Navona, where the 
immortal gods were worshipped — the immortal gods 
who are now dead ; but the Pantheon in Oxford 
Street, ladies, where you purchase feeble pomatums, 
music, glassware, and baby-linen ; and which has its 
history too. Have not Selwyn, and Walpole, and 
March, and Carlisle figured there ? Has not Prince 
Florizel flounced through the hall in his rustling 
domino, and danced there in powdered splendour." 
And now the Pantheon is not even a bazaar, and where 
the Prince Regent danced beer is bottled. 

George Warrington, when he first married Theo, in 
The Virginians, lived in Dean Street, Soho, and wrote 
to his wife years later, when he was in London without 
her, recording " how he had been to look up at the 
windows of the dear old house in Dean Street, and 
wondered who was sitting in the chamber where he 
and Theo had been so happy." Luckworth Crewe 
and Nancy Lord, roaming on Jubilee night, in In the 
Year of Jubilee, tramped along Oxford Street, and 
had turned aside into the same Soho byway when the 
self-confident Crewe remarked, " I know I shall live 
to be a rich man, just as well as I know that I'm 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 285 

walking down Dean Street with Miss Lord." Lady 
Betty, in Tom Taylor's Lady Clancarty, tells Lord 
Clancarty, " I'm Lady Betty Noel, at your service, 
and to be heard of at my Lord Gainsborough's, in 
Soho Square," but that was in Soho's more fashion- 
able period, that Thackeray moralised over ; and in 
that same period Jenny Wilmot, of Besant's Orange 
Girl, who had sold oranges outside Drury Lane Theatre 
before she became a celebrated actress, kept her 
fashionable Assembly Rooms in Soho Square, and had 
her windows blazing with light every night, and her 
chambers filled with masqueraders and card-playing 
parties. Mr. Jaggers, of A Tale of Two Cities, lived 
in Gerrard Street, Soho, in "a house on the south 
side of the street, rather a stately house of its kind ; " 
and Manette Street sufficiently indicates the position 
once occupied by "the quiet lodgings of Doctor 
Manette," of A Tale of Two Cities, " in a street corner 
not far from Soho Square "—that wonderful corner 
for echoes where Lucie Manette sat " listening to the 
echoing footsteps of the years," and round which 
revolved so much of the tragedy of Sydney Carton's 
life and death. 

A few paces down the High Street, between Charing 
Cross Road and New Oxford Street, is the church of 
St. Giles, past which Dickens went one night, with 
Inspector Field, as its clock was striking nine, to visit 
a filthy lodging house, filled with " a dream of baleful 
faces," in a street that was fifty yards from the Police 
Station here, and " within call of St. Giles's Church." 
Wedged in a bend by the church wall, in The Orange Girl, 
" a tavern called the Black Jack stands over against 
the west front of St. Giles's Church, at the corner of 



286 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Denmark Street, with a double entrance, which has 
proved useful, I believe, on the appearance of con- 
stables or Bow Street runners. The Church, which 
is large and handsome, worthy of better parishioners, 
stands in the midst of a quarter famous for harbouring,' 
producing and encouraging the most audacious rogues 
and the most impudent drabs that can be found in 
the whole of London." You have the character of 
the house in brief in the frank confession made by 
the charming Jenny Wilmot to the young Lord who 
loved and wanted to marry her, and whom she would 
not marry, for his own sake : 

"This," I told my Lord, " is the Black Jack tavern. It 
is the House of Call for most of the rogues and thieves of Soho. 
The Church is St Giles's Church. As for my own interest in 
the house, I was born there : my mother and sister still keep 
the place between them : it is in good repute among the gentry 
who frequent it for its kitchen, where there is always a fire for 
those who cook their own suppers, and for the drinks which 
are excellent, if not cheap. What is the use of keeping cheap 
things for thieves? Lightly got, lightly spent. There is 
nothing cheap at that House. My mother enjoys a reputation 
lor being a Receiver of Stolen Goods— a reputation well 
deserved, as I have reason to believe. The goods are all stowed 
away in a stone vault or cellar once belonging to some kind of 
house— I know not what." 

The place actually stood there until a few years 
ago, and this was its actual reputation. There Jenny 
went one evening, taking Will Halliday with her, and 
when they came from the foul, heated atmosphere of 
the tavern, and the loose talk of its drunken, villainous 
company, " Outside the taU white spire of St. Giles's, 
looked down upon us. In the churchyard the white 
tombs stood in peace, and overhead the moon sailed 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 287 

in splendour. Jenny drew a long breath : she caught 
one of the rails of the churchyard and looked in 
curiously." Here and about the churchyard she had 
played as a child, and she went away weeping that it 
seemed so impossible for her ever to forget the past 
and escape from its influence. 

At the other end of Charing Cross Road, on the 
skirts of Soho, lies Leicester Square, the Leicester 
Fields in which Harry Esmond fought his fatal duel 
with Lord Mohun ; and one night Will Halliday, of 
the Orange Girl, had an adventure near the same 
spot. " My way home," he says, " lay through Dean 
Street as far as St. Ann's Church : then I passed across 
Leicester Fields into St. Martin's Lane. All this part 
of the way is greatly infested at night by lurking 
footpads from the choice purlieus of Seven Dials and 
Soho." In Green Street he was waylaid and beaten 
by hired bullies whose employer, Mr. Probus, was 
anxious to have Halliday disgraced and put out of 
the way ; bleeding and half unconscious he was 
handed over to the watch, and charged with robbing 
one of his assailants, who posed as a countryman 
whom the other ruffians had rescued. Seven Dials 
has been shorn of its worst features, but a good deal 
of it is recognisably the same as when Dickens wrote 
of it in the Sketches by Boz ; and I have the vividest 
notion of the barber's shop of Monsieur Morbleu, in 
one of its grimy little streets, the scene of so much 
that happened in Moncrieff's amusing and once 
popular farce, Monsieur Tonson. 

In Newman Street, to the north of Oxford Street, 
Mr. Turveydrop, of Bleak House, had his dancing 
academy ; and before we go on along Oxford Street 



288 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

into Holborn, we must make a brief excursion north, 
up Tottenham Court Road, which is sombrely alive 
with memories of Gissing's New Grub Street. But it 
swarms, too, with other memories. When Micawber's 
goods were sold up for rent, whilst Traddles was 
lodging with him, " the broker carried off," as Traddles 
explained to David Copperfield, " my little round 
table with the marble top, and Sophy's flower-pot and 
stand," articles that he was cherishing towards setting 
up a house of his own when he and Sophy were 
married. " Now I have kept my eye since on the 
broker's shop," said Traddles, "which is up at the 
top of Tottenham Court Road, and at last, to-day, I 
find them out for sale." He was afraid to appear 
personally in the transaction, lest the broker, know- 
ing of his anxiety to recover them, should demand 
an impossible price, so he and David went and 
waited round the corner whilst Mrs. Barkis (otherwise 
Peggoty) entered the shop and bought the property 
back for him. There was a day when Warrington, in 
The Virginians, drove up Tottenham Court Road 
towards Marylebone, and lost himself " in the green 
lanes behind Mr. Whitfield's round Tabernacle in 
Tottenham Road and the fields in the midst of which 
Middlesex Hospital stood." Mr. Whitfield's Taber- 
nacle is still there, but it is a new one and no longer 
round, and there are no fields within sight of it. Clive, 
in The Newcomes, had his studio in Howland Street 
and bought bargains, in the way of furniture for his 
house, in Tottenham Court Road ; Clive's friend, 
James Binney lived in Fitzroy Square ; and for a time, 
before his marriage Clive had rooms in Charlotte 
Street, which is out of Fitzroy Square. But the drab 




Cl6R.K<£H)N£LL (LOSS 
jrcd^Adcook. : 



] 'ou have only to linger awhile in the Close to-day to realise how wonderfully Gissin k 
,. 1 ?*L~-f!L,*j +h* lit* nnd 7,erv atmosphere of it into his story. 

Chapter 13 



•e only 10 linger a-cuii.u,e. t" <■'-" ^«— -- ~-s -- 
has transferred the life and very atmosphere of ; 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 289 

hues and settled dull atmosphere of this neighbour- 
hood are nowhere so prevailing as in New Grub 
Street. When Edwin Reardon came to London to 
embark upon that literary career that brought him 
so much of disappointment and misery, he lived here 
for most of the first four years. " From a certain 
point in Tottenham Court Road there is visible a 
certain garret window in a certain street which runs 
parallel with that thoroughfare ; for the greater part 
of these four years the garret in question was 
Reardon's home." He used to study in the British 
Museum Reading Room, " the valley of the shadow 
of books," that is to the east of Tottenham Court 
Road ; in the British Museum too worked Marian 
Yule, and Jasper Milvain, overtaking her in Totten- 
ham Court Road, walked with her as far as Mornington 
Crescent, in Hampstead Road, Camden Town, where 
he lived, and whence she went on by bus to her father's 
house near Regent's Park. Gissing himself, in his 
darkest days, lived off Tottenham Court Road, and 
there, in Percy Street, lived that cheerful bohemian 
Albert Smith. 

If you push northwards through Camden Town, 
St. Pancras, Kentish Town and Hampstead, it is all 
haunted ground. Ben Jonson puts most of the scenes 
of his Tale of a Tub in Kentish Town ; the rest are at 
Tottenham Court, St. Pancras and Marylebone ; and 
the whole of it is thickly sown with local allusions. 
Heywood, too, has a scene of his Wise Woman of 
Hogsdon at Kentish Town, outside the house of Mother 
Redcap, another wise woman, who has a noted tavern 
at Kentish Town named after her to this day. You 
have a vision of Defoe's Colonel Jack hastening up 

19 



290 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Tottenham Court Road, which he has entered out of 
the fields, bent on one of his nefarious enterprises ; 
and farther on, by St. Pancras Church, " Upon the 
path, within the bank, on the side of the road going 
towards Kentish Town, two of our gang, Will and one 
of the others met a single gentleman, walking apace 
towards the town ; being almost dark, Will cried, 
' Mark, ho ! ' which, it seems, was the word at which 
we were all to stand still at a distance, come in if he 
wanted help, and give a signal if anything appeared 
that was dangerous. Will steps up to the gentleman, 
stops him, and put the question, that is, ■ Sir, your 
money ? ' The gentleman seeing he was alone, 
struck at him with his cane ; but Will, a nimble, 
strong fellow, flew in upon him, and, with struggling, 
got him down ; then he begged for his life, Will having 
told him with an oath that he would cut his throat." 

At this juncture a hackney coach came driving 
along, and whilst Will held the gentleman down and 
rifled his pockets, the rest of the gang attacked the 
coach, robbed the persons in it, and then they all 
made off with their booty, down Tottenham Court 
Road, across St. Giles's and Piccadilly, and into Hyde 
Park ; here they robbed another coach between Hyde 
Park Gate and Knightsbridge, and hurrying on did 
more business of the same kind in the same night at 
Chelsea. In Somers Town, which adjoins Camden 
Town, resided Mr. Snawley, of Nicholas Nickleby, in a 
mean street " in the second of four little houses, one 
story high, with green shutters," and with him Mr. 
Wackford Squeers lodged, when he stayed longer in 
town than usual. Dickens himself lived, in his boy- 
hood, at Johnson Street, Somers Town, where his 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 291 

house has been recently marked. In Little College 
Street (now College Place), Camden Town, where also 
Dickens himself lived, Mr. Micawber had a house near 
the Veterinary College, when Tommy Traddles was 
lodging with him and suffered from the rapacity of 
the broker's man. Farther out, at Hampstead, Walter 
Hartwright, of Clement's Inn, in Wilkie Collins's 
Woman in White, having arrived in his walk over 
Hampstead Heath at a point " where four roads 
meet — the road to Hampstead, along which I had 
returned ; the road to Finchley ; the road to West 
End ; and the road back to London ; " (which is 
clearly at the end of Piatt's Lane) had turned London- 
wards about one o'clock in the morning when he felt 
a hand laid on his shoulder from behind and started 
round to face " a solitary woman, dressed from head 
to foot in white garments." At Jack Straw's Castle, 
on the Heath, where Dickens often dined, Fred 
Bayham, in The Newcomes, went to have a chop, with 
his poor friend Kitely ; and on the verge of the Heath, 
towards Highgate, Mrs. Bardell, of Pickwick, went 
with Master Bardell and a party of friends to take the 
air and have refreshment in the pleasant tea-garden of 
The Spaniards. 

Continuing up Oxford Street, from Tottenham Court 
Road, you come to Hart Street, where young George 
Osborn was a day boy at the school of the Rev. 
Lawrence Veal, and Josh and Major Dobbin arrived 
at the door in a carriage one day to see him ; and the 
opening scene of Monsieur Tonson happens out of 
doors in " Hart Street, Bloomsbury." The first 
turning to the left in Hart Street takes you to the 
British Museum, in and out of which went those 



292 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

people of Gissing's New Grub Street, and into which 
Bob Hewett took Clem Peckover, in The Nether World, 
because years ago his father had once taken him there 
on a public holiday. Egremont, of Thyrza, had his 
permanent lodgings in Great Russell Street, which is 
the street of the Museum, where he was frequently 
busy with research work ; and Gilbert Grail came 
haunting those Great Russell Street rooms, when 
Thyrza had vanished and Egremont was absent, and 
he suspected the two had gone away together. Past 
the Museum, Bloomsbury Square lies to the right of 
you and Russell Square on your left. In Bloomsbury 
Square was Lord Mansfield's house, that was burned 
down by the Gordon rioters in Barnaby Rudge ; a 
crime for which the law hanged some of the rioters 
here in the Square. John Sedley, of Vanity Fair, 
had his house in Russell Square ; here Amelia lived 
and from here was married to George Osborn. 
Osborn's father had his house also in the Square, and 
after old Sedley was ruined and sold up, and had 
removed to Fulham, after George Osborn had died 
at Waterloo, and Amelia, left very poor and never 
yet acknowledged by her husband's family, had con- 
sented to let her little son be brought up by his wealthy 
grandfather, there were days when she yearned to see 
the child, and then — " she takes a long walk into 
London — yes, as far as Russell Square, and rests on 
the stone by the railing of the garden opposite Mr. 
Osborne's house. . . . She can look up and see the 
drawing-room window illuminated, and at about nine 
o'clock, the chamber in the upper story where Georgy 
sleeps." One Sunday, going so, she saw him come 
across the Square with his aunt and the footman on 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 293 

the way to church, and followed them, " until she 
came to the Foundling Church, into which she went. 
There she sat in a place whence she could see the 
head of the boy under his father's tombstone. Many 
hundred fresh children's voices rose up there and 
sang hymns to the Father Beneficent and ... his 
mother could not see him for awhile, through the 
mist that dimmed her eyes." 

The Foundling Church is part of the Foundling 
Hospital, which is in Great Coram Street, and the 
name of it is inseparably linked with the story of 
Little Dorrit, where Mr. Meagles explains to Clennam 
how it was he and Mrs. Meagles came to adopt 
Tattycoram as a maid for their daughter : 

" One day, five or six years ago now, when we took Pet 
to church at the Foundling — you have heard of the Foundling 
Hospital in London ? Similar to the Institution for the 
Found Children in Paris ? " 

" I have seen it." 

" Well ! One day when we took Pet to church there to 
hear the music — because, as practical people, it is the business 
of our lives to show her everything that we think can please 
her — Mother (my usual name for Mrs. Meagles) began to cry 
so, that it was necessary to take her out. ' What's the 
matter, Mother ? ' said I, when we had brought her a little 
round, ' you are frightening Pet, my dear.' ' Yes, I know that, 
Father,' says Mother, ' but I think it's through my loving her 
so much that it ever came into my head.' ' That ever what 
came into your head, Mother ? ' '0, dear, dear ! ' cried 
Mother, breaking out afresh, ' when I saw all those children 
ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none 
of them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us 
all in Heaven, I thought does any wretched mother ever come 
here and look among those young faces, wondering which is 
the poor child she brought into this forlorn world, never through 



294 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 






all its life to know her love, her kiss, her face, her voice, even 
her name ! ' Now, that was practical in Mother, and I told 
her so. I said, ' Mother, that's what I call practical in you, my 
dear.' ... So I said next day : Now, Mother, I have a pro- 
position to make which I think you'll approve of. Let us take 
one of those same children to be a little maid to Pet. . . . And 
that's the way we came by Tatty coram/ ' 

Returning through Russell Square and Bloomsbury 
Square, down Southampton Row, where George War- 
rington had one of his various London lodgings, we get 
back into Oxford Street, just where it joins Holborn. 
Nearly facing Kingsway until lately was that notable 
Kingsgate Street, in which Sairey Gamp lodged over 
the shop of Poll Sewddlepipes, but no trace of it sur- 
vives ; passing Chancery Lane on our right, we come to 
Gray's Inn on our left ; Justice Shallow, in Henry IV., 
boasts that in his wild youth, he had a fight " with 
Sampson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn ; " 
but much more recently Mr. Pickwick went in by this 
ancient archway many a time on his way to see his 
lawyer, Mr. Perker, in Gray's Inn Square. Mr. Percy 
Noakes, of the Sketches by Boz, had chambers in the 
same Square, and his friend, Mr. Loggins, the solicitor, 
who went on the steam excursion with him, had ofhces 
in the contiguous Boswell Court. After his marriage, 
Traddles had a small set of chambers in Holborn 
Court, Gray's Inn, and when David Copperfield called 
on him there, he found him very happy, in spite of the 
overcrowding occasioned by five of his wife's sisters 
staying with them on a visit, sleeping three in one 
room and two in another, whilst he and his wife were 
stowed away by night in a very small room in the 
roof. 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC, 295 

Gray's Inn Road used to be Gray's Inn Lane, when 
it was narrower, and Mr. W. C. Hazlitt, writing a few 
years ago, says " a person who died some years since 
used to speak to me of a haystack within his recollec- 
tion at the bottom of Gray's Inn Lane;" which 
reminds me of Mr. Transfer, in Foote's play, The 
Minor, for running over a list of his possessions 
Transfer says, " Stay, stay, then again, at my country 
house, the bottom of Gray's Inn Lane, there's a 
hundred ton of fine hay, only damaged a little last 
winter for want of thatching." It was down such a 
still somewhat rural Gray's Inn Lane that Fielding's 
Tom Jones and Partridge came by coach from St. 
Alban's on their first journey to London, and put up 
at the Bull and Gate, which has vanished from Holborn. 
Straight across Holborn from the end of Gray's Inn 
Road, and you pass under the archway into Staple 
Inn, which stands as you find it in Edwin Drood : 

" Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, London, where 
certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking 
on the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old 
Bourne that has long run dry, is a little nook composed of two 
irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those 
nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street, imparts 
to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton 
in his ears and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those 
nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as 
though they called to one another, ' Let us play at country,' 
and where a few feet of garden-mould and a few feet of gravel 
enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny under- 
standings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks that are legal 
nooks ; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its 
roof. . . . Neither wind nor sun favoured Staple Inn one 
December afternoon towards six o'clock, when it was filled 



296 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

with fog, and candles shed murky and blurred rays through 
the windows of all the then-occupied sets of chambers, notably 
from a set of chambers in a corner house in the little inner 
quadrangle, presenting in black and white over its ugly portal 
the mysterious inscription : 

P 
J T 

1747. 

In which set of chambers, never having troubled his head 
about the inscription, unless to bethink himself at odd times 
on glancing up at it, that haply it might mean Perhaps John 
Thomas, or Perhaps Joe Tyler, sat Mr. Grewgious writing by his 
fire." 

For these were the chambers of that grim, kindly 
old lawyer, and, with those initials over their doorway, 
there is no mistaking them. After the murder — or 
supposed murder, of Edwin Drood, Rosa came to 
Grewgious there, and he took a room for her in the 
hotel up Furnival's Inn across the road in Holborn. 
Mr. Tartar's chambers were also in Staple Inn ; and 
to Staple Inn, to refresh himself with a sight of the 
garden, Mr. Snagsby, the law stationer of Bleak House, 
used to come round from Took's Court for his evening's 
airing. 

Traddles, before he was married, lived up " behind 
the parapet of a house in Castle Street, Holborn," 
which is the next turning to Staple Inn, but has been 
stupidly renamed Furnival Street. Thither David 
Copperfield went with Mr. Dick and found Traddles 
hard at work in a small room, among the furniture of 
which were the flower-pot stand and the little round 
table they had rescued from the broker's shop in 
Tottenham Court Road. Nearly facing this street, 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 297 

across the other side of Holborn, is Furnival's Inn 
(all sadly modernised), where Dickens lived when he 
was writing Pickwick, and where John Westlock, of 
Martin Chuzzlewit was living when Tom Pinch set out 
to see him and lost his way and wandered as far as 
the Monument before he found it. Over the road 
again is Barnard's Inn, where Pip, of Great Expecta- 
tions, had his chambers, and I have always believed 
that Dampit, of Middleton's old comedy, A Trick to 
Catch the Old One, lived in Fetter Lane ; for one scene 
of the play is in his house, and coming home he re- 
marks on the unsavoury atmosphere in his room and 
exclaims, " Fie upon't, what a choice of stinks here 
r ! . . . Foh ! I think they burn horns in Barnard's 
Inn, If ever I smelt such an abominable stink, usury 
forsake me ! " and Barnard's Inn stretches immediately 
behind this end of Fetter Lane ; there was another 
entrance from Fetter Lane into it before it was im- 
proved almost beyond recognition. 

Once more across the road, almost fronting Fetter 
Lane, is the site — now occupied by a railway goods 
office — of that Bull Inn where Mr. Lewsome lay ill and 
Mrs. Gamp nursed him ; at Holborn Circus, we diverge 
into Thavies Inn, which, unlike most of the Inns, has 
no archway ; it had one in its prime, but is now a 
plain, open street with a few old houses left in it, 
one of which may very well be the house of Mrs. 
Jellaby, of Bleak House. Esther Summerson and the 
Wards in Chancery were to pass the night at Mrs. 
Jellaby's, when they were in town for the making of 
that application to the Lord Chancellor for appoint- 
ing Esther companion to Ada Clare. Mr. Guppy 
escorted them round from Old Square, and they 



298 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

arrived here to join a crowd that was gathered before 
the house, because, as Mr. Guppy ascertained, " One 
of the young Jellaby's been and got his head through 
the area railings ; " and it is only the older houses 
that have these. 

Thavies Inn branches from one side of Holborn 
Circus, and Hatton Garden from the other, and the 
house at 53, Hatton Garden was the old police-court 
presided over by a Mr. Laing, an unjust and intolerant 
magistrate, who was the original of Mr. Fang in Oliver 
Twist ; you may learn from Forster how Dickens 
contrived to be smuggled into that police-office one 
morning in order that he might witness Mr. Laing's 
habitual outbreaks and model on him the magistrate 
who bullied Oliver. Next to Hatton Garden is Ely 
Place, the site of Ely House, where Shakespeare puts 
the death-scene of John of Gaunt, in Richard II., and 
it were glory enough for it that it was in this place 
old Gaunt uttered his nobly patriotic valediction : 

This royal throne of kings, this seat of Mars, 

This other Eden, demi-paradise, 

This fortress built by Nature for herself 

Against infection and the hand of war, 

This happy breed of men, this little world, 

This precious stone set in the silver sea . . . 

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, 

Feared by their breed and famous by their birth . . . 

England, bound in with the triumphant sea . . . 

That England that was wont to conquer others, 

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. 

Here was the garden of the Bishop of Ely's house in 
Holborn, where Gloucester had noticed good straw- 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 299 

merries growing, and bade the Bishop send for some 
of them, in that scene in the Tower. David Copper- 
field had a note one morning, at his rooms in Bucking- 
lam Street, Strand, from Agnes Wickfield, to say she 
was in London and " staying at the house of papa's 
gent, Mr. Waterbrook, in Ely Place, Holborn," and 
thither went David that day, and the next, when he 
sat down to dinner with her and Uriah Heep here, 
and with Tommy Traddles and certain of Mr. Water- 
brook's family circle, including, you remember, 
Hamlet's Aunt. 

Ahead of us, from Holborn Circus, runs Holborn 
Viaduct, and over the Viaduct from Clerkenwell went 
Bob Hewett and Penelope, otherwise Pennyloaf, 
Candy, in The Nether World, making for Holborn 
Viaduct Station with a crowd of similar youths and 
maidens to spend the August Bank Holiday (which 
was also Bob's and Pennyloaf's wedding day) at the 
Crystal Palace. There was trouble at the Palace ; 
Clem Peckover, who was one of the party, jealous of 
Pennyloaf, had lured Bob Hewett into falling out with 
ler cavalier for the day, Jack Bartley, and as they 
were all streaming out from Holborn Viaduct Station 
that night, on the road home, one of Clem's lot squirted 
some dirty fluid over Pennyloaf's dress and spoilt it. 
Bob Hewett was prompt to avenge her, but Bartley 
evading an immediate conflict, ran away, Bob in hot 
pursuit, and all the others streaming after, towards 
Clerkenwell Green. On the way there, we turn aside 
for a moment, up Charles Street, out of Farringdon 
Street, as far as Bleeding Heart Yard, where Daniel 
Doyce, of Little Dorrit, had his factory ; where Plornish 
lived in the parlour of a large residence that was 



300 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

let off to various tenants, and John Baptist Cavaletto, 
came to lodge at the top of the same house. Landlord 
of all the houses in Bleeding Heart Yard was the 
patriarchal Mr. Casby, and into the yard periodically 
flitted Mr. Panks, who collected his rents for him. It 
has been too much knocked down and rebuilt for one 
to make any attempt at identifying Doyce's ware- 
house, or Plornish's dwelling, but it is something 
that over this ground so many of Dickens's people 
came and went, and that here, at last, Panks un- 
masked the Patriarch, and in a frenzy of righteous 
scorn of his hypocrisy, whipped out a pair of scissors 
and shore off his benevolent white hair and beard 
and showed him to his harried tenants for the miser- 
able old rascal that he was. 

Farther up Farringdon Street, where it has become 
Farringdon Road, is Farringdon Road Buildings, a 
gloomy pile of barrack-like Workmen's Dwellings, 
where John Hewett, of The Nether World , joined a 
Mr. and Mrs. Eagles in the tenancy of a flat up on the 
fifth story, after his wife's death. Across the barren 
courtyard of the Buildings, up the stone steps to that 
flat, went Hewett, and his younger children, Tom and 
Anne ; and Sidney Kirkwood, occasionally, when he 
called to see them ; and up the steps to it went Clara 
Hewett with her father, when he fetched her home, 
after her brief career on the stage, where a jealous 
rival actress had flung vitriol at the beauty of her face 
and made it repellently hideous : 

" The economy prevailing in to-day's architecture takes 
good care that no depressing circumstances shall be absent 
from the dwellings in which the poor find shelter. What 
terrible barracks, those Farringdon Road Buildings ! Vast 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 301 

sheer walls, unbroken by even an attempt at ornament ; row 
above row of windows in the mud-coloured surface, upwards, 
upwards, lifeless eyes, murky openings that tell of barrenness, 
disorder, comfortlessness within. ... An inner courtyard, 
asphalted, swept clean — looking up to the sky as from a prison. 
Acres of these edifices, the tinge of grime declaring the relative 
dates of their erection ; millions of tons of brute brick and 
mortar, crushing the spirit as you gaze. Barracks, in truth ; 
housing for the army of industrialism, an army fighting with 
itself, rank against rank, man against man, that the survivors 
may have whereon to feed. Pass by in the night, and strain 
imagination to picture the weltering mass of human weariness, 
of bestiality, of unmerited dolour, of hopeless hope, of crushed 
surrender, tumbled together within these forbidding walls. 
Clara hated the place from her first hour in it. It seemed to 
her that the air was poisoned with the odour of an unclean 
crowd. The yells of children at play in the courtyard tortured 
her nerves ; the regular sounds on the staircase, day after 
day repeated at the same hours, incidents of the life of poverty, 
irritated her sick brain and filled her with despair to think 
that as long as she lived she could never hope to rise again 
above this world to which she was born." 

This despair made her desperate and unscrupulous. 
In the days when she had begun to believe she had the 
world at her feet, she slighted Sidney Kirkwood and 
rejected him ; now she set herself to recapture him ; 
her affliction appealed to his pity and his chivalry ; 
he steeled himself against his love for Jane Snowden 
and with a feeling that in Clara's extremity, he must 
be true to his love of the past, he was easily lured 
back to his allegiance to her. On the night when 
she was planning in her mind the interview at which 
Kirkwood was to succumb, she stood looking from 
her window in Farringdon Road Buildings over the 
innumerable chimneys of the City : 



302 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 






" Directly in front, rising mist-detached from the lower masses 
of building, stood in black majesty the dome of St Paul's ; its 
vastness suffered no diminution from this high outlook, rather 
was exaggerated by the flying, scraps of misty vapour which 
softened its outline and at times gave it the appearance of 
floating on a vague troubled sea. Somewhat nearer, amid 
many spires and steeples, lay the surly bulk of Newgate. . . . 
Nearer again, the markets of Smithfield, Bartholomew's 
Hospital, the tract of modern deformity, cleft by a gulf of 
railway, which spreads between Clerkenwell Road and Charter- 
house Street. Down in Farringdon Street the carts, waggons, 
vans, cabs, omnibuses, crossed and intermingled in a steaming 
splash-bath of mud ; human beings, reduced to their due 
paltriness, seemed to toil in exasperation along the strips of 
pavement, bound on errands which were a mockery, driven 
automaton-like by forces they neither understood nor could 
resist. . . . Then her eye fell upon the spire of St James's 
Church, on Clerkenwell Green, whose bells used to be so familiar 
to her." 

So looking out over the City, from her high window 
in this drab, bleak, unhomelike mass of Workmen's 
Dwellings, brooding on the hopes of her past, and 
despairing of her future, Clara Hewett resolved to 
reassert her earlier claim on Kirkwood's love, and 
went out, cloaking her marred face, and round by 
Clerkenwell Road, to St. John's Square, and sent a 
boy into the place where Kirkwood was employed 
with a letter that brought him to her that night, and 
when he left her he had been drawn into asking her 
again to be his wife, and she had consented. 

From Clerkenwell Green to Islington, Gissing has 
made all this dreary tract of shabby houses peculiarly 
his own. In one of these streets of Clerkenwell, 
" towards that part of its confines which is nearest 
to the Charterhouse," Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge, 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 303 

put the shop of Dolly Varden's father, the locksmith ; 
and " in a narrow and a dirty street," somewhere 
among the " working- jeweller population taking 
sanctuary about the church in Clerkenwell," he put 
the shop of Silas Wegg's friend, Mr. Venus, the taxi- 
dermist, of Our Mutual Friend ; on Clerkenwell Green 
itself, the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates picked the 
pocket of old Mr. Brownlow, as he stood reading at a 
bookstall, and bolted, leaving Oliver Twist to be over- 
taken and charged with their crime. But if you have 
read The Nether World (to say nothing of The Un- 
classed, whose Mr. Abraham Woodstock lives in St. 
John's Street Road) you cannot go through Clerken- 
well without being conscious that you are walking in 
Gissing's country. 

On the very first page of The Nether World, you see 
old Mr. Snowden returned to England after long 
absence in Australia, walk slowly across Clerkenwell 
Green and pause by the graveyard of St. James's 
Church, looking about him. He had used to live 
near by, and is here in search of the son he had left 
behind him : 

" The burial ground by which he had paused was as little 
restful to the eye as are most of those discoverable in the by- 
ways of London. The small trees that grew about it shivered 
in their leaflessness ; the rank grass was wan under the failing 
day ; most of the stones leaned this way or that, emblems of 
neglect (they were very white at the top, and darkened down- 
wards till the damp soil made them black), and certain cats 
and dogs were prowling or sporting among the graves. . . . 
The old man had fixed his eyes half absently on the inscription 
of a gravestone near him ; a lean cat springing out between the 
iron railings seemed to recall his attention, and with a sigh he 
went forward along the narrow street which is called St James's 



304 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

Walk. In a few minutes he had reached the end of it, 
and found himself facing a high grey-brick wall, wherein, 
at this point, was an arched gateway closed with black 
doors." 

Above this gateway was a sculptured human face 
distraught with agony, and over it was carved the 
legend : " Middlesex House of Detention/' This old 
prison is gone, and a County Council School is in its 
place ; under the school are still one or two of the 
ancient cells, used now as lumber rooms. Seeing a 
woman at an open door, the old man asked her if she 
knew anyone of the name of Snowden living there- 
abouts ; she did not, but recommended him to en- 
quire at the public-house at the corner, and to that 
public-house, which is there unchanged, he went, 
with no better success. He was overheard enquiring 
there by a small child who had come in for a jug of 
beer. She was too shy to say anything until after 
he was gone, and it was through other channels that 
he eventually found her. 

This small girl was the daughter of Snowden's son, 
Joseph, who had deserted her long since, and she had 
been kept on by his landlady, Mrs. Peckover, and was 
degenerated into the little drudge of that lady and her 
daughter Clem, at their house in Clerkenwell Close. 
At that time, Mr. Hewett, with his consumptive 
second wife, her baby, and Clara and Bob, her step- 
children, lodged in the same house ; and Kirkwood, 
Hewett's friend and already in love with Clara, came 
often to it to see them, and took a sympathetic interest 
in the starveling little Jane who slaved and slept in 
the gloomy basement. You have only to linger a 
while in the Close to-day to realise how wonderfully 




"In Wash-house Court they show you what is traditionally the room in which 
in Colonel Newcome lived and died. 

Chapter l J 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, £TC. 30S 

Gissing has transferred the life and very atmosphere 
of it into his story. 

Kirkwood worked in St. John's Square, for a 
certain " H. Lewis, Working Jeweller," and Gissing's 
description makes it an easy task to identify the 
place : 

" His workshop was in St. John's Square. Of all the areas in 
London thus defined, this Square of St. John is probably the 
most irregular in outline. It is cut in two by Clerkenwell 
Road, and the buildings which compose it form such a number 
of recesses, of abortive streets, of shadowed alleys, that from 
no point of the Square can anything like a general view of its 
totality be obtained. The exit from it on the south side is by 
St. John's Lane, at the entrance to which stands a survival 
from a buried world — the embattled and windowed archway 
which is all that remains above ground of the great Priory of 
St. John of Jerusalem. Here dwelt the Knights Hospitallers, 
in days when Clerkenwell was a rural parish, distant by a long 
stretch of green country from the walls of London. But other 
and nearer memories are revived by St. John's Arch. In the 
rooms above the gateway dwelt, a hundred and fifty years 
ago, one Edward Cave, publisher of the Gentleman's Magazine, 
and there many a time sat a journeyman author of his, by 
name Samuel Johnson, too often impransus. There it was 
that the said Samuel once had his dinner handed to him behind 
a screen, because of his unpresentable costume, when Cave 
was entertaining an aristocratic guest. ... St. John's Arch 
had a place in Sidney Kirkwood's earliest memories. From 
the window of his present workshop he could see its grey 
battlements." 

And when he was a boy he lived with his father 
who " occupied part of a house in St. John's Lane, 
not thirty yards from the Arch : he was a printer's 
roller maker, and did but an indifferent business." 
Throughout most of the Nether World, Kirkwood now 
20 



306 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

has his lodgings in Tysoe Street, a dismal street, with 
a shop or two in it and a few old, faded houses, five 
minutes north of the Green, out of Exmouth Street 
(down which Oliver Twist came when he first entered 
London with the Artful Dodger), but in the latter 
stages of the story he had removed to Red Lion 
Street, which is next to St. John's Lane, in the 
Clerkenwell Road. Old Snowden, in his young 
married days, lived in Hill Street ; behind the School 
which has replaced the House of Detention at the 
top of St. James's Walk, is Rosoman Street, a long, 
unlovely street in one of whose public-houses Jack 
Bartley met the man who induced him and Bob 
Hewett to embark on a disastrous coining enterprise ; 
and in Merlin Place, near Rosoman Street, Bob and 
Pennyloaf lived after they were married. It was by 
St. James's Church that Jack Bartley made a stand 
on that August Bank-Holiday night when the riotous 
party returned from the Crystal Palace, and by the 
time two policemen came and separated them, Bob 
was torn and bleeding, and Pennyloaf's wedding-dress 
was in rags from the furious mauling of the jealous 
Clem Peckover. Clerkenwell Green, with Radical 
and Socialist speakers haranguing crowds on it of a 
Sunday, and this old church of St. James stand in 
the heart of the Nether World ; nearly all its people 
lived within sight of the church spire and within sound 
of its bells ; but one incident that remains curiously 
clear in my recollection happened in Myddleton 
Passage, where Bob Hewett asked Pennyloaf to meet 
him in the early days of his wooing. Myddleton 
Passage is up the northern end of St. John's Street 
Road, across Rosebery Avenue, and behind Sadler's 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 307 

Wells Theatre, and it is now as when Gissing 
etched it : 

" It is a narrow paved walk between brick walls seven feet 
high ; on the one hand lies the New River Head, on the other 
are small gardens behind Myddleton Square. The branches 
of a few trees hang over ; there are doors, seemingly never 
opened, belonging one to each garden ; a couple of gas lamps 
shed feeble light. Pennyloaf paced the length of the Passage 
several times, meeting no one. Then a policeman came along 
with echoing tread, and eyed her suspiciously. She had to 
wait more than a quarter of an hour before Bob Hewett 
made his appearance. Greeting her with a nod and a laugh, 
he took up a leaning position against the wall, and began 
to put questions concerning the state of things at her 
home." 

Presently he enquired if Pennyloaf had seen any- 
thing of Clem, and confessed that she had " got her 
back up " a bit about them ; and just then " a man's 
figure appeared at a little distance, and almost 
immediately withdrew again round a winding of the 
Passage/' Bob suspected it was Jack Bartley, 
already under Clem's influence and ready at any time 
to do her bidding, and he ran off sharply to see. He 
had not gone far when Clem came running from the 
other end of the Passage, and in a moment had flung 
herself upon Pennyloaf and was striking and tearing 
at her tigerishly. Bob hastened back to the rescue ; 
gripped Clem's arms and forced them behind her 
back, and so holding her, cried to Pennyloaf, " You 
run off 'ome ! If she tries this on again, I'll murder 
her ! " Pennyloaf 's " hysterical cries and frantic 
invectives " were still making the Passage ring, but 
Bob repeating his command, she obeyed, and when 



308 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

she was well out of sight, he released Clem, and laughed 
scornfully at her as she went off vowing vengeance. 
But so long as the Passage is there, the sight and 
hideous noise of that combat remain in it for anyone 
who has read the Nether World. 

Being so far north, we will go back down the Goswell 
Road, in which Mr. Pickwick lived when he lodged 
with Mrs. Bardell ; cross Clerkenwell Road again 
where it joins Old Street, turn off to the right out of 
Aldersgate Street into Charterhouse Square, and end 
our pilgrimage in the Charterhouse, where Thackeray 
went to school, and afterwards sent so many of his 
characters. Philip Firmin was brought to it by his 
mother, in Philip, and was laid up ill in it during the 
holidays in a room whose windows opened into the 
Square. References to the Charterhouse crop up in 
several of Thackeray's minor works, but the old 
school has its principal place in The Newcomes. Clive 
Newcome belonged to it, like his father before him, 
and when the Colonel returns from India and goes to 
see his son there, they " walk the playground together, 
that gravelly flat, as destitute of herbage as the 
Arabian desert, but, nevertheless, in the language of 
the place, called the green. They walk the green, 
and they pace the cloisters, and Clive shows his father 
his own name of Thomas Newcome carved upon one 
of the arches forty years ago." 

Pendennis, too, was a Charterhouse boy, and 
towards the end of The Newcomes, writing as the 
supposed author of that book, he says : 

" Mention has been made once or twice in the 
course of this history of the Grey Friar's School — 
where the Colonel and Clive and T had been brought 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 309 

up — an ancient foundation of the time of James I., 
still subsisting in the heart of London city. The 
death-day of the founder of the place is still kept 
solemnly by Cistercians. In their chapel, where 
assemble the boys of the school, and the fourscore old 
men of the Hospital, the founder's tomb stands, a 
huge edifice, emblazoned with heraldic decorations 
and clumsy carved allegories. There is an old Hall, 
a beautiful specimen of the architecture of James's 
time — an old Hall ? many old halls ; old staircases, 
old passages, old chambers decorated with old por- 
traits, walking in the midst of which we walk, as it 
were, in the early seventeenth century." He goes on 
to describe a Founder's Day, and to tell how attending 
it on the 12th of a December, he looked up from the 
service in the chapel and saw seated among the black- 
coated old pensioners Colonel Newcome, fallen on 
evil days and come here for refuge, to end his life as 
one of the Poor Brethren of the Charterhouse. On a 
later occasion, Pendennis comes with Ethel Newcome 
to visit the Colonel ; he chances to be out for the day ; 
but they go into his room, and Ethel looks " at the 
pictures of Clive and his boy ; the two sabres crossed 
over the mantlepiece ; the Bible laid on the table 
by the old latticed window." In this same room the 
Colonel lay ill at last and dying, and you remember 
the close of his story : "At the usual evening hour 
the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas Newcome's 
hands outside the bed feebly beat time. And just as 
the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over 
his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly 
said ' Adsum ! ' and fell back. It was the word we 
used at school, when names were called ; and lo, 



310 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 

he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had 
answered to his name, and stood in the presence of 
The Master." 

No scholars are there now ; the school has been 
removed outside London ; but you may see the place 
just as Thackeray pictures it, and it is still a quiet 
haven for the Poor Brethren of the Charterhouse. 
The chapel bell that Colonel Newcome heard still 
rings at the usual hour every evening, as they tell 
you it has rung every evening for some three cen- 
turies ; and in Washouse Court they show you what 
is traditionally the room in which the Colonel lived 
and died. 

Since we must end somewhere, we may as well end 
here, against Smithfield, where we began. Not that 
our theme is exhausted ; it is inexhaustible. All our 
great English authors have spent some of their time 
in London, from Chaucer downwards ; more than 
half of them have lived many years in it ; many of 
them — I believe I should not be far wrong even if I 
said half of them — were born in it, and as often as 
not it is their personal experiences of it that they 
have written into the lives of their characters. It is 
always decaying, and passing away, and renewing 
itself. Once London was as full of houses and streets 
associated with the imaginary men and women of the 
Elizabethan dramatists (those loyalest of Londoners) 
as now it is of associations with the imaginary people 
of Dickens, Thackeray, Gissing ; as to-morrow it will 
be of similar associations with the characters of the 
imaginative writers of to-day ; and it is because, for 
all its stern realities, it is such a wonderland of 
glorious dreams that every true Londoner sighs, 



OXFORD STREET, HOLBORN, ETC. 311 

in his heart, with that good cockney, Henry S. 
Leigh : 

The haunts we revelled in to-day 

We lose to-morrow morning ; 
As one by one are swept away 

In turn without a warning. . . . 
No nook nor cranny dear to me 

Should undergo removal, 
Though Progress went on either knee 

To beg for my approval ! 



INDEX 



Adam Street, 255 
Adcock, St. John, 32 
Addison, Joseph, 248, 280 
Adelphi Hotel, 255-6 
Ainsworth, Harrison, 38, 42, 

151, 203, 227, 250, 272, 280 
Albany, The, 281 
Alchemist, The, 238 
Aldersgate Street, 20, 308 
Aldgate, 56, 133, 134, 136-8 
Aldwych, 250 
All Sorts and Conditions of Men, 

140, 142-7 
Alsatia, 222-7 
Amelia, 270-1 
Amen Corner, 206 
Angel, The, Islington, 97 
— Court, Southwark, 184 
Anne Boleyn, 155 
Apsley House, 272 
Askew, Anne, 11, 12, 13 
Austin Friars, 99 



Bank, The, 73, 74, 75, 98, 219 
Bankside, 120, 198-202 
Barbican, 25, 165 
Barclay & Perkins's Brewery, 

181 
Bardolph, 34, 161-3, 249, 268 
Barnaby Rudge, 42, 69, 70, 171, 

180, 195, 240, 262, 283, 292, 

302 
Barnard's Inn, 38, 297 
Bartholomew Close, 13, 20, 29, 

30, 31 
— Fair, 10, 11, 13, 19, 121 
Bartholomew Fair, 5, 16-19, 54» 

58 
Bartholomew Lane, 76 
Battersea, 175 



131. 



Baynard's Castle, 172 
Bayswater Road, 282 
Beaconsfield, Lord, 70-2, 

261, 273 
Beadnell, Maria, 112 
Bear Garden, Bankside, 198, 

201 
Beaumont, Francis, 60, 267-8 
Beaumont & Fletcher, 51, 59, 

203, 212, 246 
Bedlam, 195 
Bell Alley, 77, 113 
Bell of St. Paul's, The, 120, 148, 

172, 173, 197-201, 205, 206, 

220 
Belle Sauvage, The, 208, 213 
Bell Yard, 237, 238 
Ben Jonson Tavern, The, 124, 

147 
Berkeley Street, 278 
— Square, 280 
Bermondsey, 175 
Besant, Sir Walter, 

120, 139-47, 172, 

185, 196, 197-201, 



44-7- 

173, 

205, 



72. 
174. 
206, 



214, 220, 264-6, 267, 275-6, 

283, 285, 286-7 
Besant and Rice, 283 
Bethlehem Hospital, 195 
Bethnal Green, 147 
Bevis Marks, 125-31 
Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, 72, 

264-6, 267 
Billingsgate Market, 170 
Birch's, 74 
Birchin Lane, 102 
Birdcage Walk, 271 
Bird-in-Hand Court, 58 
Bishop's Court, 236 
Bishopsgate Street, 109, 116- 

I2i, 261 

313 



314 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



Black, William, 256 
Blackfriars Bridge, 196, 199, 
228 

— Road, 87, 97, 196, 228 
Blake, William, 81, 175 

Bleak House, 228, 232-35, 236, 

237, 243, 287, 296, 297-8 
Bleeding Heart Yard, 299 
Bloomsbury Square, 292 
Boar's Head, The, 160, 161, 162, 

163 
Bobadil, Captain, 64-7, 78 
Boffin, Mr., 231, 232, 238 
Boleyn, Anne, 153, 256, 267 
Bolton, Fanny, 26, 239, 240, 

242 
Borough, Southwark, 92, 181- 

187 
Bouverie Street, 1 
Bow Church, 60, 61 

— Lane, 58 

— Road, 147 

— Street, 70, 252-3 
Bond Street, 281 

Brass, Sampson, 125-7, I2 9~ 

131 
Bread Street, 50, 57, 59 
Brick Court, Temple, 242 
British Museum, 289, 291-2 
Brixton, 175, 189 
Bronte, Charlotte, 99, 206 
Browne, Matthew, 207 
Browning, Robert, 159 
Buchanan, Robert, 243-4 
Buckingham Palace, 271 

— Street, 254, 257, 258, 260 
Bucklersbury, 62 

Bull Inn, Bishopsgate Street, 57, 
120 

Whitechapel, 138, 139 

Bunhill Fields, 81 

— Row, 79 
Bunyan, John, 39, 81 
Burbage, 120 
Burney, Fanny, 190, 283 
Bury Street, St. James's, 238, 

280 
Butcher Row, Aldgate, 135, 

137 
By Proxy, 234 
Byron, Lord, 281 



Cade, Jack, 68, 152, 156, 157, 

163-4, l82 
Caledonian Market, 28 
Camber well Green, 188 
Camden Town, 84, 291 
Camomile Street, 119 
Cannon Street, 120, 163, 202 

Terminus, 199 

Canterbury Pilgrims, The, 182 
Carey Street, 236 
Carlton Terrace, 262 
Carlyle, Thomas, 235 
Carton, Sydney, 47, 240, 285 
Caxton, William, 268 
Chadband, Mr., 17, 237 
Chancery Lane, 229, 231, 232, 

233, 234 
Chaplain of the Fleet, The, 214 
Chapman, George, 78 
Chapter Coffee House, 206 
Chapter House Court, 206 
Charing Cross, 189, 245, 246, 

253, 259, 261, 270 
Charles I. statue, Charing Cross, 

259, 269 
Charlotte Street, 288 
Charterhouse, The, 22, 308-10 
— Street, 26, 27 
Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A, 5, 

56 
Chatterton, Thomas, 206 
Chaucer, 137, 174, 180, 181, 

182 
Cheapside, 51-74, 75, 102 
Chelsea, 117, 269 
Cheshire Cheese, The, 220 
Chichester Rents, 237 
Child's Bank, 228, 231 
Chimes, The, 229, 235 
Chiswell Street, 25, 79 
Chiswick Mall, 269 
Chivery, John, 187, 197 
Christian government, 79, 80, 

142, 164, 217, 218, 300-2, 

304 
Christ's Hospital, 48 
Christopher Tadpole, 194, 249, 

250, 259, 274 
Church Street, Westminster, 263 
City Madam, The, 194, 213, 214, 

2I 3 



INDEX 



315 



City Road, 66, 73, 75, 79, 80, 81- 

92 
Clapham, 175 

Clarence, Duke of, 153, 157 
Claypole, Noah, 26, 177, 178, 

179, 253 
Clement's Inn, 248, 250, 254, 

291 
Cleopatra's Needle, 243 
Clerkenwell, 5, 56, 93, 95, 299- 
308 

— Close, 95, 304 

— Green, 299, 302, 303, 306 
Clifford's Inn, 232 

Clink Prison, 202 

— Street, 202, 218 
Cloth Fair, 13, 21 
Cock Lane, 14 

Cock Tavern, 220, 229 
Cockney, his love of London, 1, 

3, 61, 311 
Codlin and Short, 129, 130 
Coldharbour Lane, 189 
Colebrook Row, 96 
Coleman Street, 65, 66, 67, 77, 

78 
Coleridge, S. T., 48 
College Place, 291 
Collins, Wilkie, 291 
Colonel Jack, 20, 21, 78, 138, 

289, 290 
Congreve, William, 270 
Constitution Hill, 270 
Cook, Mrs. E. T., 280 
Cophagus, Phineas, 35 
Cornhill, 50, 73, 74, 99-1 n, 

180 
Cory at, Thomas, 58 
Covent Garden, 252-5 
Cow Cross Street, 4, 6, 7 
Cowper, William, 170 
Cowley, Abraham, 77 
Cozeners, The, 235 
Craven Street, 258 
Crawley, Rawdon, 237, 278-80 
Cromwell, Richard, 81 
Crosby, Hall, 117 
Cross Keys, Wood Street, 27, 52, 

53 
Crown Office Row, 240 
Crown Tavern, 14, 15, 33 



Cruncher, Jerry, 227, 228, 229 
Crystal Palace, 1 
Cursitor Street, 237, 238, 278 
Curtain Theatre, 81 
Curzon Street, 278-80 
Custom House, 148, 170 
Cutter of Coleman Street, 77 
Cuttle, Captain, 109 



Dagmar Street, Camberwell, 

189 
Darnay, Charles, 47 
David Copperfield, 75, 87-92, 

112, 139, 167, 170, 177, 195, 

208-10, 237, 254, 256, 257- 

259, 260-1, 288, 291, 294, 296, 

299 
Davidson, John, 204 
Deans, Jeanie, 247, 269 
Dean Street, Soho, 284, 287 
Dean's Yard, 266 
Defoe, Daniel, 20, 21, 76, 77, 78, 

101, 102, 131-138, 289, 290 
Dekker, Thomas, 49, 100, 101, 

no, in, 160 
Democratic government, 217 
De Morgan, William, 32 
Denmark Street, 286 
De Quincey, Thomas, 283 
Devereux Court, 246, 248 
Devil is an Ass, The, 59, 100, 

273 

Devil Tavern, 220, 230 

Dickens, Charles, 22, 33, 38-41, 
47, 51, 61, 62, 69, 70, 75, 77, 
84-92, 99, 102, 103-10, 111- 
114, 125-59, 165-7, I 7 I > 
177, 181, 183, 184-9, 190, 
i95> 196, 197, 207-10, 219, 
220, 227, 228, 231-8, 240, 
247, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256- 
257, 259-61, 263, 271, 281, 284, 
285, 287, 288, 290-1, 292, 293- 
294, 295-6, 297-300, 302, 303, 
306, 308 

DTsraeli, Isaac, 131 

Doctor's Commons, 183, 207-10, 

257 
Dodson & Fogg, Messrs, 102, 

113 



316 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



Dombey & Sow, 109, 171 
Donne, Dr. John, 51, 53, 229, 

268 
Dorset Street, 224, 226 
Doulton's Potteries, 190 
Dove Court, 63, 64 
Dover Street, 280 
Dowgate, 174 
Downing Street, 261, 262 
Drury Lane, 237, 250 
Duke of York's column, 3, 269, 

271-2 
Duke Street, Aldgate, 125 
Piccadilly, 281 



Eagle Tavern, The, 84, 85, 86 

Eastcheap, 160 

East End, The, 138-47 

— India Dock Road, 147 
Edgware Road, 282 
Edwin Drood, 295-6, 
Elephant and Castle, 228 
Elinor, Queen, 58 
Elizabeth, Lady, 155, 213 

Ely Place, Holborn, 157, 298, 

299 
Embankment, Thames, 243-4 
Emerson, R. W., 1 

— Street, 198 
Esmond, 42, 253, 272 
Essex, Earl of, 153 

— Street, 250, 251 
Etty, William, 256 
Evelina, 190, 283 
Evelyn, John, 196 

Every Man in his Humour, 63, 

64-8, 81 
Every Man out of his Humour, 54 
Exmouth Street, 306 



Fagin, 22, 42, 177 

Falstaff, 4, 5, 34, 63, 114, 160, 

248-9, 268 
Farmhouse, The, 187, 188 
Farquhar, George, 234, 255, 270 
Farringdon Road Buildings, 299- 

302 
— Street, 39, 168, 170, 213, 217, 

218, 219, 299 



Fetter Lane, 220, 297 
Finsbury, 56 

— Pavement, 78 

— Square, 25, 75 
Field, Inspector, 188, 285 
Fielding, Henry, 42, 47, 253, 

270-1, 295 

— Sir John, 70 
Finch Lane, 101 

Fish Street Hill, 167, 170 
Fitzroy Square, 288 
Fleet Lane, 214 

— Market, 39, 214 

— Prison, n 4* 213, 214-18, 

268 

— Street, 209, 213, 219-31, 237, 

245 
Fletcher, John, 180 
Flyte, Miss, 233, 236 
Foote, Samuel, 165, 219, 220, 

235, 248, 295 
Ford, John, 149 
Fore Street, 78 
Forster, John, 235 
Fortune of War, The, 14 
Fortunes of Nigel, The, 114, 153, 

154, 173, 225, 226, 229, 230, 

270 
Foster Lane, 52 
Foundling Hospital, 35, 293-4 
Fountain Court, Temple, 242, 

243 
Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 11, 12, 

13 
Frederick's Place, 63 
Freeman's Court, Cornhill, 102 
Friday Street, 51, 59 
Furnival's Inn, 165, 296, 297 
Furnival Street, 296 



Garden Court, Temple, 242, 

243 
Garlick Hill, 173 
George and Vulture, The, 77, 112, 

"3 

George Court, 246 

— Yard, Borough, 183 

— Yard, Lombard Street, 77, 

112, 113, 
Gerrard Street, Soho, 31, 285 



INDEX 



31? 



Gibbons, Grinling, 213 
Giltspur Street, 8, 13, 34, 38 
Gissing, George, 44, 63, 80, 92- 
97, 98, 121, 122-4, 167, 176, 
189, 191-210, 211, 235, 236, 
247-8, 251-2, 266-7, 26 9» 28 4» 
288, 289, 292, 299-308 
Globe Theatre, 181, 198, 199, 

201-2 
Golden Butterfly, The, 283 
Golden Cross Hotel, 254, 258, 

259, 261 
Golden Square, 283, 284 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 44, 206, 241, 
242 

— Buildings, 231, 238 

— Street, 53 
Gone Astray, 61 
Goodman's Yard, 147 
Gordon Riots, 42, 69, 70, 195 
Goswell Road, 308 
Governing caste, The, 217, 218 
Gower, John, 180 
Gracechurch Street, 103, 115, 

116, 120 
Gray, Thomas, 102, 152, 158 
Gray's Inn, 294 

Road, 295 

Great College Street, 264-6 

— Coram Street, 293 

Great Expectations, 22, 27-31, 52, 

53, 139, 188-9, 242, 297 
Great Fire of London, 14, 58, 
152, 165, 203 

— Russell Street, 292 

— St Helens, 117 

— Smith Street, 263 

— Tower Hill (see Tower Hill) 
Grecian Coffee House, 248 
Green Arbour Court, 44 

Green Dragon, Fleet Street, 

224 
Green Park, 272 

— Street, 287 
Greene, Robert, 174 
Grey, Lady Jane, 153, 154 
Gresham, Sir Thomas, 120 
Grove Lane, Camberwell, 189 
Guildhall, 60, 61, 62 

Guy Fawkes conspirators, 153 
Guy's Hospital, 181 



Hampstead, 291 
Hand Alley, 131 
Hand Court, 252 
Hanging-Sword Alley, 226, 227, 

228 
Hanover Street, Islington, 82, 

92-6 
Hariey, Earl of Oxford, 256 
Harrow Alley, 135 
Hartshorn Lane, 258 
Hart Street, Bloomsbury, 291 
Hatton Garden, 298 
Haunted London, 44, 91, 159, 

202, 217, 218 
Haymarket, 259, 269 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 204 
Hazlitt, William, 48 

— W. C, 295 

Heart oj Midlothian, The, 247, 

269 
Heep, Uriah, 257 
Henley, W. E., 260, 268 
Henrietta Temple, 261 
Henry IV., 4, 5, 34, 63, 114, 

160, 267, 268, 294 
Henry V., 267, 268 
Henry VI., 153, 156, 163-4, 

182, 240, 267 
Henry VIII., 256, 268 
Heriot, Master, 114, 154 
Herrick, Robert, 57 
Hexam, Lizzie, 103-8, 176, 

263 
Hey for Honesty, Down with 

Knavery, 5, 57, 78 
Heywood, Thomas, 58, 115, 

289 
High Street, Oxford Street, 285 
Hobson, 56, 57, 120 
Holborn, 59, 75. *37> *57 

— Viaduct, 38, 39, 299 
Holinshed's Chronicle, 164 
Holywell Street, 250 
Hone, William, 116 

Hood, Thomas, 57, 204, 205, 

252 
Hornet, Jack, 22 
Horse Guards, The, 261 
Horsemonger Lane, 187 
Hosier Lane, 14, 15, 26, 27, 33, 

34 



318 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



Houndsditch, 109, 121, 124, 

125, 131-6 
Howland Street, 288 
Hoxton, 66, 81 
Human Odds and Ends, 180, 221, 

222, 
Hungerford Stairs, 195, 254, 

256 
Hunt, Leigh, 48 
Huxter, Mr., 26 
Hyde Park, 270-5, 290 
Hyde Park, 252, 272-3 

In the Year of Jubilee, 167, 176, 

189, 247, 266, 284 
Irving, Washington, 160, 161 
/ Islington, 73, 82, 92-7 
Ivy Lane, 49 

Jack Straw's Castle, 291 
Jacob's Island, 179 
Jaggers, Mr., 27-31, 53, 285 
Japhet in Search of a Father, 34, 

35, 36 
Jeffries, Judge, 153 
Jerrold, Douglas, 6, 7, 8, 220, 

2 35 

Jingle, Mr., 183, 207, 216 

Johnson, Dr Samuel, 27, 219, 
241, 245, 249, 250, 252, 255 

Johnson's Court, 220 

Johnson Street, 290 

Jonathan Wild, 47 

Jonson, Ben, 5, 15, 16-19, 5 1 . 
54, 58, 59, 60, 63-8, 78, 81, 
100, 116, 117, 181, 201, 220, 
230, 231, 238, 258, 273, 289 

Journal of the Plague, 76, 77, 
I3I-3 

Katherine, Queen, 153 
Keats, John, 57, 181 
Kennington, 165, 189, 190 
— Road, 189, 190, 191 
Kentish Town, 289 
King of Denmark, The, 43 
Kingsley, Henry, 269 
King Street, Cheapside, 60, 61 

Westminster, 268 

King's Bench Prison, 92, 183 
Walk, 225, 240 



King William Street, 161 
Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 

58, 138, 203, 212, 246 
Lady Clancarty, 272, 285 
Lady of Pleasure, The, 246-7 
Lamb, Charles, 48, 96, no, 116, 
219, 240, 245, 252 

— Court, 238-40 
Lambeth, 175, 191 

— Bridge, 192, 193 

— Church, 192 

— High Street, 193 

— Marsh, 194 

— Walk, 191, 192 
Lame Lover, The, 248 
Langham Hotel, 283 
Lant Street, 181, 195, 197 
Laud, Archbishop, 153 

Law Courts, Strand, 209, 246 
Leadenhall Market, no 

— Street, 103, 108, 109 
Leicester Square, 228, 253, 287 
Leigh, Henry S., 61, 103, 311 
Leighton, Sir F., 204 
Limehouse, 139, 176 

— Church, 147 
Lincoln's Inn Fields, 234-6 
Hall, 232, 236 

Little Britain, 13, 20, 27, 28, 29, 

3i, 38 
Little Dorrit, 112, 176, 184-7, 

197, 212, 293-4, 299-300 
Liverpool Street Station, 121, 

122, 123, 124, 190 
Lombard Street, 77, n 2-4 
London Bridge, 161, 167, 176- 

180, 199 
Station, 180 

— charm of, 1, 2, 3, 191, 192 
London Lackpenny, 55, 121 
London, Poor of, 79, 80, 141, 

142, 164, 191, 192 

— Stone, 163-4 

— Wall, 76, 78, 165 
Long Acre, 250 

— Lane, 6, 8, 13, 21, 22 
Longmans, 205 
Lothbury, 75, 76 
Lovat, Lord, 153 
Love and a Bottle, 234 
Love in a Wood, 270 



INDEX 319 


Lovelace, Richard, 221 


Mitre Court, Wood Street, 54, 


Love Lane, Bankside, 198, 201 


64 


Eastcheap, 165 


— Tavern, Fleet Street, 220, 241 


Ludgate Hill, 22, 205, 206, 209, 


Mitre Tavern, The, Wood Street, 


210, 212, 213, 214 


54 


— Square, 212 


Moncrieff, W. T., 287, 291 


Lydgate, John, 55, 121 


Monmouth, Duke of, 153 


Lytton, Lord, 252, 281 


— Street, 284 




Monsieur Tonson, 287, 291 




Monument, The, 165, 166, 167, 


Macaulay, Lord, 102, 281 


168-70 


Maclise, Daniel, 235 


— Yard, 165 


Magpie Alley, 226 


Moorfields, 20, 66, 78 


Magwitch, Abel, 38, 242 


Moorgate Street, 77 


Maiden Lane, 252 


More, Sir Thomas, 120, 153 


Manchester Square, 280 


Morley's Hotel, 261 


Manette Street, 285 


Mornington Crescent, 289 


Mansell Street, 148 


Morris, Sir Lewis, 259 


Mansion House, 70, 72-4, 102 


Mother Redcap, The, 289 


Marble Arch, 282 


Murray, D. Christie, 219 


Marlowe, Christopher, 196, 201 


Muses' Looking Glass, The, 5 


Marryat, Capt., 34 


Music and poverty, 141, 142, 191, 


Martin Chuzzlewit, 52, 99, 165- 


192 


167, 242, 254, 294, 297 


Myddleton Passage, Clerkenwell, 


Marshaisea, The, 176, 181, 183, 


306-8 


184-7 




Mary, Queen, 37, 155, 213 




Massinger, Philip, 180, 194 


Nancarrow, Totty, 193, 195 


Melville, Lewis, 280 


Nancy, 22, 23-6, 37, 177-9 


Merlin Place, Clerkenwell, 306 


National Gallery, The, 260 


Mermaid Tavern, The, 51, 59, 


Ned of Aldgate, 138 


60 


Nelson, 204 


Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 5 


Nelson's column, 3, 260 


Micawber, Mr., 75, 87-92, 97, 


Nether World, The, 81, 82-4, 


183, 291 


92-7, 123, 124, 236, 247, 292, 


Middlesex Street, 121, 124 


299, 300-8 


Middleton, Thomas, 5, 56, 173, 


New Broad Street, 98 


297 


Newcomes, The, 22, 98, no, 204, 


Middle Temple Lane, 230, 238, 


238, 275, 282, 283, 288, 291, 


243 


308-10 


Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 


New Cut, The, 194 


242 


Newgate Market, 39, 49 


Mile End, 138 


— Prison, 22, 24, 28, 41-8, 


Green, 248 


53 


Road, 141, 142, 145, 147 


— Street, 37, 41, 42, 49 


Milk Street, 58 


New Grub Street, 288, 289, 292 


Millais, Sir E., 204 


Newman's Court, 102 


Millbank, 263 


Newman Street, 287 


Milton, John, 57, 78, 79, 221 


Newport Street, Lambeth, 193, 


Minor, The, 165, 219, 295 


194 


Minories, 109, 135, 137, 138 


New Square, 234 



320 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



New Turnstile, 294 

Nicholas Nickleby, 27, 38, 39- 

41, 171, 204, 247, 271, 283, 

290, 294 
No Other Way, 47 
Norfolk Street, 250, 251 
Northumberland Street, 258 
Northward Ho ! 22, 50, 164, 230 
Norton Folgate, 98, 121 
Not so Bad as we Seem, 252 
Nym, 162-3 



Obelisk, Blackfriars Road, 

195 

Old Bailey, 39, 42, 44, 213 
Old Cheshire Cheese, The, 251 
Old Curiosity Shop, 125-31, 
148, 236, 254 

— Ford, 100 

Old George Inn, The, 183 

— Jewry, 63-8, 190 
Old St. Paul's, 137, 203 

— Street, 81, 82, 83 

— Square, 233 

— Swan Pier, 176, 177 

Oliver Twist, 22, 23-6, 33, 177, 
178-80, 253, 258, 298, 303 

Orange Girl, The, 44-7, 48, 185, 
285, 286-7 

Our Mutual Friend, 103-8, 139, 
176, 231, 232, 238, 263, 281, 

3°3 
Oxford Street, 75, 282-5 



Pall Mall, 269 
Pall Mall Gazette, 215 
Palmerstone Buildings, 120 
Pantheon, The, Regent Street, 

283, 284 
Panyer Alley, 49, 50 
Paper Buildings, 240 
Paradise Lost, 79 

— Street, Lambeth, 193 
Park Lane, 282 

— Street, Southwark, 202 
Parish, Christopher, 12 1-4, 190 
Paternoster Row, 49, 50, 205, 

206 

— Square, 49 



Patron, The, 219 
Paul's Wharf, 173 
Payn, James, 234 
Peckham Rye, 175 
Pecksniff, Mr., 99, 166, 242 
Peel, Sir Robert, 51 
Peggotty, Mr., 237, 258, 261 
Pendennis, 26, 180, 190, 206, 

215, 238-40, 241-2, 253, 272, 

273-4, 280 
Pendennis, Arthur, 180, 190, 

206, 215, 238, 242, 254, 275 
Pentonville, 75, 85 
People's Palace, The, 141, 142, 

146 
Pepys, Samuel, 15, 54, 69, 229, 

251, 256 
Percy Street, 289 

Per kin Warbeck, 149, 150, 151, 

155 

Peter Lane, 6, 9 
Peter the Great, 256 
Petticoat Lane, 121, 124 
Philip, The Adventures of, 22, 

252, 272, 308 
Piccadilly, 278-81 

Pickwick Papers, 77, 102, no, 

113, 114, 181, 182, 183, 207, 

208, 213, 216, 217, 232, 255, 

256, 259, 291, 308 
Pie Corner, 14, 15, 16, 34, 214 
Pinch, Tom, 99, 165, 242, 254 
Pip, 27-31, 52, 53, 188, 189, 242, 

297 
Pistol, 162-3, 268 
Plague of London, 54, 76, 77, 

131-8, 152 
Plain Dealer, The, 171, 253, 262 
Piatt's Lane, 291 
Pleydell Court, 220 
Plornish, 185 
Plough Court, 112 
Pocket, Herbert, 38 
Poor of London, The, 79, 80, 

141, 142, 164, 191, 192 
Pope, Alexander, 112 
Portsmouth Street, 236 
Portugal Street, 236 
Poultry, 57, 69, 70-2 
Prime Minister, The, 78, 234, 

236, 262, 271-2, 280 



INDEX 



321 



Primrose Hill, Whitefriars, 226 

Pudding Lane, 14, 164, 165 

Puddle Dock, 172 

Putney, 175 

Pye Tavern, The, 135, 136 

CjUEENHITHE, 1 73 

Queen Mary, 159 
— Street, Cheapside, 120, 197 
Quickly, Dame, 34, 114, 160 
Quilp, 125, 129, 131, 148, 161, 
162-3 



Racquet Court, 219 
Rainbow Gold, 219 
Rainbow, Tavern, 220 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 51, 153 
Randolph, Thomas, 5, 57, 61, 

78, 231, 251, 273 
Rands, W. B., 207 
Redcross Street, 20 
Regent Street, 68, 283 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 204 
Richard II., 32, 117, 119, 155, 

156, 298-9 

Richard III., 117, 118, 119, 151, 

157, 158, 173 
Richardson, Samuel, 226 
Riderhood, Rogue, 139, 176 
Rogers, John, 37 
Ropemaker Street, 78 
Rose Alley, Bankside, 198 
Rosoman Street, Clerkenwell, 

306 
Rotherithe, 176, 179 
Rotten Row, 273-5 
Royal Exchange, 62, 99, 101, 

in 
Russell, Lord William, 153 

— Square, 292 

— Street, 252 



St. Andrew's Church, 26 
St. Ann's Church, Soho, 287 
St. Bartholomew's Church 8, 9, 
36 

Hospital, 8, 26, 32, 211 

St. Botolph's, Aldgate, 133-6 
St. Bride's Church, 221, 222 

21 



St. Clement Danes, 249 

St. Dunstan's Church, 229, 230 

St. Ethelburga, 119 

St. Faith's Church, 203 

St. George's Church, 177, 185-7 

Circus, 195 

St. George's, Roman Catholic, 

Cathedral, Westminster, 195 
St. Giles's, Cripplegate, 78 
Church, Oxford Street, 

285-7 
St. Giles and St. James, 6, 7, 8 
St. Helen's Church, 120 
St. James's, 272 

St. James's Church, Clerkenwell, 
303-4, 306 

Church, Piccadilly, 280 

Palace, 270, 272, 280 

Park, 269-72 

Walk, 303-4 

St. James Garlickhithe, 173 
St. John the Evangelist, 263-4 
St. John's Lane, 27, 305 

Square, 302, 305 

St. John Street Road, 26, 95, 97, 

303 
St. Margaret's, Westminster, 268 
St. Martin's Lane, 260, 287 
St. Martin's le Grand, 50 
St. Mary Axe, 103, 109, 125 
St. Mary-le-Strand, 246 
St. Michael's Alley, 113 
St. Nicholas, Deptford, 196 
St. Pancras Church, 290 
St. Paul's Cathedral, 28, 58, 167, 

(only good view of) 199-200 ; 

202, 203-12, 240, 243, 245 

Churchyard, 205, 212 

St. Peter's, Cornhill, 102 

Alley, 103 

St. Sepulchre's, 37, 38, 41 
St. Swithin's Church, 163 

St. Thomas' Street, 181 

Sackville Street, 281 

Sala, G. A., 139 

Salisbury Square, Fleet Street, 

224, 226 
Salutation and Cat, The, 48 
Saracen's Head, 27, 38, 39 
Sawyer, Bob, 181 



322 



THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



Scott, Sir Walter, 114, 153, 154, 
159. 173. 225, 226, 227, 247, 
269, 270 

Seamy Side, The, 220, 275-6 

Serpentine, The, 275 

Seven Dials, 287 

Shabby-Genteel Story, A., 171 

Shadwell, Thomas, 222-7 

Shakespeare, Edmund, 180 

— William, 4, 5, 51, 62, 63, 81, 
114, 117-19, 151, *5 2 » 155-9, 
161, 162-4, I 74» l8l » l82 > x 9 8 > 
199, 201, 202. 240, 241, 256, 
262, 267, 294, 298-9 

Shallow, Justice, 248-9, 268, 

294 
Sharp, Becky, 269, 278-80, 282 
Shepherdess Walk, 84 
Sheppard, Jack, 41, 250 
Shirley, James, 246-7, 272-3 
Shoe Lane, 219 
Shoemaker's Holiday, The, 49, 

100, 101, in, 160 
Shoreditch, 5, 56, 81, 82, 121 
Sikes, Bill, 22, 23-6, 33, 37, 179, 

180 
Silent Woman, The, 58 
Silver Street, 53 
Sir Harry Wildair, 234 
Sir Thomas Wyatt, Famous 

History of, 213 
Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, 139 
Sixteen-String-Jack, 37 
Sketches by Boz, 75, 84-6, 177, 

190, 207, 219, 253, 255, 287, 

294 
Smith, Albert, 194, 249, 250, 259, 

274, 275, 289 
Smithfield Market, 4, 8-36, 38, 
180 

— Martyrs, 11, 12, 13 

Smith Square, Westminster, 108, 

263-4 
Snobs and Suburbia, 175 
Snodgrass, Mr., 113, 255, 259 
Snow Hill, 27, 38, 39, 81 
Soho Square, 285 
Somerset House, 246, 251 
Somers Town, 290 
Southampton Row, 294 

— Street, 3 



Southey, Robert, 205 
Southwark, 92, 180 

— Bridge, 120, 176, 180, 181, 

196, 197, 199, 202, 221 

— Cathedral, 180 
Spaniards, The , 291 
Sparkes, Polly, 121-4 190, 

235 
Spendthrift, The, 280 
Spenlow & Jorkins, 208, 209, 

257 
Spitahields, 120, 147, 197 
Spring Gardens, 262 
Squeers, Mr. Wackford, 27, 38, 

41, 290 
Squire of Alsatia, The, 222-7 
Stanfield, Clarkson, 256 
Staple Inn, 295-6 
Staple of News, The, 231 
Steele, Sir Richard, 248, 280 
Stepney Church, 146 

— Green, 144, 145, 146 
Steyne, Lord, 278-80 
Stone Buildings, 234 

Stow's Survey of London, 9, 10, 

14, 50, 68, 147, 149 
Strafford, 159 
Strafford, Lord, 153 
Strand, 56, 137, 237, 245-59, 
261, 269 

— Lane, 258 
Streatham, 175 
Suckling, Sir John, 259 
Sullivan, Sir A., 204 

Sweet Lilac Walk, Spitahields, 

120, 197 
Swinburne, A. C, 175 
Swiveller, Dick, 125, 127, 128- 

131, 250 



Tabard Inn, The, 181, 182 

Tale of a Tub, A., 289 

Tale of Two Cities, A, 47, 227, 

228, 240, 285 
Tancred, 70-2, 273 
Tarleton, 120 
Tavistock Street, 253 
Taylor, Tom, 155, 272, 285 
Temple, The, 156, 222, 225, 228, 

238, 242-3 



INDEX 



323 



Temple Bar, 228, 229, 231, 237, 
238 

— Church, 238 

— Garden, 240-3 

— Hall, 240, 242 

— Lane, 226 

Tennyson, Lord, 60, 159, 229, 

2 35 
Thackeray, W. M., 22, 72-4, 98, 

159. 167, 171. i9o> 204, 220, 

237, 238, 240-2, 252, 254, 

255, 269, 273-4, 275, 278-80, 

283-4, 288, 291, 292, 308-10 
Thames Street, 44, 165, 170, 

171-4, 177, 212 
Thanet Place, 247-8 
Thavies Inn, 297-8 
Thrale, Mr., 181 
Threadneedle Street, 98, 121 
Three Clerks, The, 48, 101, 170, 

251, 262, 269 
Three Nuns Tavern, The, 133, 

134, 136, 147 
Thyrza, 189, 190, 266-7, 292 
Todgers's, 165, 167 
Tokenhouse Yard, 76 
Tom Jones, 253, 295 
Took's Court, 235 
Tooting, 175 
Tottenham Court Road, 288, 

289, 290 
Tower of London, 44, 147, 148, 

149-59, 164 
Tower of London, The, 15 1-9, 

199 
Tower Hill, 148, 149 

— Street, III, 160 

Town Traveller, The, 63, 98, 121, 

122, 123, 189, 190, 235, 247, 

251-2 
Traddles, Tommy, 257, 288, 291, 

296, 299 
Trafalgar Square, 259-61 
Trick to Catch the Old One, A., 

I73> 297 
Trinity Almshouses, 142, 143, 

144 
Trollope, Anthony, 48, 78, 101, 

170, 234, 236, 251, 262, 269, 

271-2, 280 
Tudor Street, 225 



Tulkinghorn, Mr., 235 
Tupman, Mr., 113, 259 
Turner, J. M. W., 204, 252 
Turnmill, otherwise Turnbull, 

Street, 4, 5 
'Twixt Axe and Crown, 155, 272 
Tyburn, 37, 282 
Tyler, Wat, 32, 68, 152 
Tysoe Street, Clerkenwell, 93, 306 



Unclassed, The, 189, 247-8, 269, 

3°3 

Upper Kennington Lane, 189 
Upper Street, Islington, 96 



Vanbrugh Sir John, 270 
Vanity Fair, 171, 237, 269, 278- 

280, 282, 291, 292 
Vauxhall, 189, 190, 194, 195 
Vilette, 99 
Villiers Street, 256 
Virginians, The, 167, 274, 280, 

284, 288 



Walcot Square, Kennington, 

189, 190 
Waller, Edmund, 253 
Walnut Tree Walk, Lambeth, 

191, 193 
Walton, Izaak, 229 
Walworth, Sir William, 32 
Wardour Street, 283, 284 
Warrington, George, 180, 206, 

215, 238, 274, 284, 288 
Warwick Lane, 48, 49 
Waterloo Bridge, 194, 252 
Way of the World, The, 270 
Webster, John, 22, 50, 54, 59, 

62, 120, 164, 213, 230 
Welbeck Street, 283 
Weller, Sam, 102, no, 182, 183, 
207, 232 

— Tony, no, 114, 213 
Wellington, Duke of, 204, 272 

— Street, 251, 252 
Wemmick, Mr., 29, 30, 31, 53, 

188-9 
Wesley, John, 81 



324 THE BOOKLOVER'S LONDON 



Westminster, 108, 262-8 

— Abbey, 262, 265, 266-8 

— Bridge,. 194, 243, 263 
• Road, 192 

— Hall, 171, 247, 262-3 
Westward Ho ! 54, 59, 62, 120 
Whitechapel, 138 

— Bars, 137 

— Road, 147 
Whitefriars, 222-7 

— Street, 222, 224 
Whitehall, 247, 262 

White Hart Inn, The, 182, 183 
White Hart Street, 49 
White's Club, 280 
Whitfield's Tabernacle, 288 
Whittington, Dick, 60 
Wild, Jonathan, 41 
Wilderness Lane, 226 
William the Conqueror, i«, 152 
Will's Coffee House, 252 
Windmill Tavern, The, 64, 65 
Windsor Terrace, 86-92, 183 
Wine Office Court, 219 



Winkle, Mr., 114, 259 

Wise Woman of Hogsdon, The, 58, 

115, 289 
Wit Without Money, 59 
Woman in White, The, 291 
Wood Street, 27, 52-5 
Wordsworth, William, 19, 55, 194 
Workmen's Dwellings, 79, 80, 

300-2 
World Went Very Well Then, The 

196 
Wormwood Street, 119 
Wrayburn, Eugene, 107, 108, 

231, 238 
Wren, Sir Christopher, 200, 203 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 155, 213 
Wych Street, 250 
Wycherley, William, 171, 253, 
255, 262, 270 



Yellowplush, 

280 
Young, Edward, 



Jeames, 71-4, 
267 



N 66 891 



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